By Evi Tsakali,
If I have understood something, especially throughout my academic journey, it is that -at some point- you will be the privileged in the room. Having initially attended a degraded public school (which was basically containers placed in a row), then transferring to a small family-owned Montessori school before spending my senior high school years in one of the most prestigious Athenian private schools (I won’t dare say “the most”, because I can sense I am unleashing the fury, or the teasing -depending on the intentions- of some of my readers), I got to experience both sides of the coin. To the eyes of my middle school classmates, I would become the posh girl who supposedly ditched her friends for the fancier school, and who would (God forbid!) unintentionally throw English words here and there in her sentences, her new school being to a certain extent bilingual. To my new classmates on the other hand, I was the new girl who was super excited about everything on campus, even the things they would complain about (such as the fact that we had to conduct research in the library, which was a whole building, unlike my previous schools, where we didn’t even have at least a room to call a library). I had to become a social chameleon.
After high school, things would follow a similar pattern; in my Greek university, I was the one snobbing the institution by studying abroad in parallel, searching for the designated seats during exams (spoiler, there aren’t any) and wondering why the exam papers were not anonymized like in her French university, whereas in France I got to meet people who took things for granted that I didn’t. For many of my friends, some family names and some acquaintances meant something, and the odds were that for someone to reach our level of education and especially in institutions like the one we studied in, their parents must have done likewise (which more or less canceled my existence as a first-generation university graduate in my family). For them, studying abroad was the natural course of things, something they knew for years that would happen (meanwhile, 10-year-old Evi could not even imagine where her future self would find herself, not even close because she couldn’t afford to have such an imagination).
I will admit, and maybe it is a bit weird to do so in an article, that I have been unfair to them, quick to judge. However, human relationships work wonders…it is very fascinating how a person turns from nobody into somebody in your life. Those somebodies taught me that your privileges do not make you any less valid or any less meritorious than the ones who may have needed to walk the extra mile. My love and admiration for the people who inspire these lines (along with some personal development) made me realize that it would be hypocritical not to acknowledge that fact when we claim we are in favor of meritocracy, and if we want to believe (and I do want to believe) that the meritorious will always prevail. They taught me that, at the end of the day, it is not about who has the right acquaintances, the -allow me the French term we would use- “piston”, but who decides to take the long road nonetheless; it is not about whose parent holds a certain position, but who almost dismissed the detail by saying (and only if asked) that the parent in question “works in the city” as if they were working at the store in the corner of the street where we were walking.
They were the ones that would come to my mind (among other reasons) now during my postgraduate studies when I would turn into the privileged one once again. Disclaimer: the College of Europe definitely has my heart (or at least, except of the piece of it left in Paris), and if I began to enumerate what I love about it I would write all of my article submissions for the year, but some people need to consider that the “diversity” part in “united in diversity” works also the other way round. The number of times I have been told (even worse if I count the times it has been implied) that I have certain qualifications and experiences/say something smart/am knowledgeable on specific topics because I am a private school graduate/grew up in the capital city and thus had more opportunities and stimuli/ “my parents had the means to send me abroad to study when I was 18” is disappointing. I will not waste my word count by commenting on the formulation of the aforementioned, shifting the emphasis on money rather than my studies abroad being well deserved (I have always found comments on how much money people have or don’t have disgusting). I will insist though on the fact that I will not allow my hard work, my passions, what I stand for, and what I believe in to be belittled and dismissed as the obvious result of privilege and better opportunities, like I condemn that the three brilliant men of the previous paragraph be considered mere products of their environment, which they didn’t choose and that they didn’t take from anyone; because they are much more than that.
Another chaotic article is coming to its conclusion to highlight that it is always crucial to check our privileges in our journey of self-work and self-development, but that does not mean we owe an apology for them. In whichever side -privileged or not- we find ourselves in each situation, we need to have an open mind and an open heart, to learn from the people that surround us, and to let them learn from us. In the meantime, may we cherish the people who stick around through all the fluctuations of the privilege cycle, who see through us and celebrate us for who we are, a perfect mosaic of our choices; the ones who support us no matter what, get excited about our successes and acknowledge that we proceed to changes for the better…
PS: I will always be happy to be socially chameleoning with you; I left Paris, but I never left you…
