Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2010-06-21 11:27 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2010-06-21 11:27 pm
Entry tags:
Nailing colors to the mast
I wrote the following as part of my (successful) application to the school which I am attending. I wanted to post it here because it is still true, and I wanted to have it on hand to remind myself of that.
I was fortunate to be born into a family that valued education highly: besides inculcating the ideology of education in myself and my sister, my parents put our futures before their own luxury by sending us to the best private schools in our area. Between loans for tuition and personal sacrifice, they kept us in the vanguard of a comfortably middle-class lifestyle while giving us excellent educations, an inestimably precious gift and a debt I can only hope to pay forward rather than back. Between my parents’ encouragement and my own scholarly inclinations, I cannot recall a time when I did not plan to enter graduate school. Although I enjoyed the year I spent on a Fulbright Fellowship in Japan and have appreciated my break from academia since my grant’s conclusion, I am eager to begin the next phase of my education.
Despite the undeniable sacrifices my parents made for my education, it would be fatuous to claim that my educational history and experiences do not reflect a great deal of economic and racial privilege, which is not obviated by my being a woman. Today in the United States women actually outnumber men in the college population as a whole, and I am not comfortable claiming that my own ease of access to higher education is a symbol of increasing social justice rather than of simple societal trends. Despite having lived abroad in Japan for a year, I do not claim to thereby somehow understand racism, discrimination and the lack of privilege as they are experienced by minorities in the United States, but I have at least been made aware of the invidious inequities that vein our society; indeed, the more one listens and looks, the more one sees and hears unthinking expressions that are manifestations of unexamined privilege at best and casual racism at worst. For all these reasons, I am both extremely desirous of doing what I can to expand equality of access to higher education in my future career and extremely wary of allowing my own perspective to derail a cause that is fundamentally not about me, except inasmuch as the elimination of oppression enriches humanity as a whole. In particular, I am concerned that in my future scholarship I not engage in unwitting appropriation, cultural or otherwise, or conduct research focusing on underprivileged groups that re-inscribes existing oppressions. I have become a firm believer in the idea that underrepresented groups should whenever possible speak and act for themselves, rather than having others presume to speak for them, and I would prefer that rather than co-opt such voices my future research facilitate others hearing them.
I was fortunate to be born into a family that valued education highly: besides inculcating the ideology of education in myself and my sister, my parents put our futures before their own luxury by sending us to the best private schools in our area. Between loans for tuition and personal sacrifice, they kept us in the vanguard of a comfortably middle-class lifestyle while giving us excellent educations, an inestimably precious gift and a debt I can only hope to pay forward rather than back. Between my parents’ encouragement and my own scholarly inclinations, I cannot recall a time when I did not plan to enter graduate school. Although I enjoyed the year I spent on a Fulbright Fellowship in Japan and have appreciated my break from academia since my grant’s conclusion, I am eager to begin the next phase of my education.
Despite the undeniable sacrifices my parents made for my education, it would be fatuous to claim that my educational history and experiences do not reflect a great deal of economic and racial privilege, which is not obviated by my being a woman. Today in the United States women actually outnumber men in the college population as a whole, and I am not comfortable claiming that my own ease of access to higher education is a symbol of increasing social justice rather than of simple societal trends. Despite having lived abroad in Japan for a year, I do not claim to thereby somehow understand racism, discrimination and the lack of privilege as they are experienced by minorities in the United States, but I have at least been made aware of the invidious inequities that vein our society; indeed, the more one listens and looks, the more one sees and hears unthinking expressions that are manifestations of unexamined privilege at best and casual racism at worst. For all these reasons, I am both extremely desirous of doing what I can to expand equality of access to higher education in my future career and extremely wary of allowing my own perspective to derail a cause that is fundamentally not about me, except inasmuch as the elimination of oppression enriches humanity as a whole. In particular, I am concerned that in my future scholarship I not engage in unwitting appropriation, cultural or otherwise, or conduct research focusing on underprivileged groups that re-inscribes existing oppressions. I have become a firm believer in the idea that underrepresented groups should whenever possible speak and act for themselves, rather than having others presume to speak for them, and I would prefer that rather than co-opt such voices my future research facilitate others hearing them.