ROWAN PLINSKY

THE GHOST OF PRIVILEGE Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

14 15 13 EDITORIAL I t is following us, wherever we go. Lurking, stalking and -- worst of all -- watching our backs. A long, dark hand quick as a spider, reaches up as fast as it can, and opens the door for us. Silently, it slips our job applications on top of the stack. It walks in front of us, shielding us from danger, from harassment from prosecution.

It lives with us, in our skin colors, in our gender identities and even in our wallets. The worst part is that everyone can see it, but us.

“What could this beast be?” you may ask. What is this ominous essence that has attached itself to us? Is it a poltergeist, or a phantom perhaps? No, this is ghost of our privilege.

A ghost can manifest itself in many forms. It can appear in our skin, our social statuses, our genders, our wealth, our education, our religious beliefs and countless other aspects of our lives.

To us, our ghosts probably seem pretty awesome. It helps us in almost all aspects of life. Everything we know could be haunted, but we are going in a good direction. Things are looking up.

The problem is, not everyone’s ghosts are as strong as ours. Many people do not have a ghost of privilege at all. Having privilege means we are in a position where we have more opportunities than other people. We are unjustifiably in a higher place socially than others. So what do we do? We were born with this ghost of privilege that we don’t know how to deal with.

The key to dealing with our privilege is to understand that we have privilege. Once we are able to understand our situations we should be able to see that it is unjust. We have this advantage that we never knew was there, but once we know, we will understand that not everyone has it. Our ghosts have been disenfranchising others. We may have been given more than we deserve, while others deserve more than they have. There is no way to get rid of our privilege. Whether we like it or not, it will always be there. I have privilege. I am a middle-class white girl who is receiving an above-average public education. I have a lot of privilege, I know that. And I can use this knowledge in order to try to stop the disempowerment of others. Rowan Plinsky is a reporter for the Free Press. This is her first year on staff. She is the co-president of Lawrence Free Poetry and is on the swim team. ROWAN PLINSKY

Photo by KLAIRE SARVER

A DIFFERENT KIND OF GHOST STORY

Editor reflects on missed connections

Somewhere in Denmark, there is a boy who helped me scrub burnt Japanese noodles out of a stainless steel frying pan.

Somewhere in Denmark, there is a boy who sat with me on a patch of dirt and listened with wide eyes as I told him about a man named Michael Brown and a kid named Trayvon Martin and a country drowning in gun violence. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand.

Somewhere in Denmark, there is a boy I haven’t spoken to in over a year.

Somewhere in Montana, there is a friend whose moving car I jumped out of on a night when I laughed harder than anyone in the world, probably. Somewhere in Montana, there is a friend who takes pictures of cats in autumn and mountains I feel like I’ve been to in my sleep and skies with more stars than spaces in between them.

Somewhere in Montana, there is a friend I haven’t spoken to in months.

They are ghosts to me now. They are intangible. They are presences I feel occasionally when i’m looking out over a lake, when it’s two in the morning, when the sun is at it’s solstice; but mostly, they are slowly disappearing.

There are a lot of people who only come to me in lakes and mornings and sunshine. There are a lot of people I will probably never see again, bodies I will never hug, laughs I will soon forget.

Memories are so fickle. Sometimes I can remember moments vividly; but other times, the moments die out, become ghosts, vanish. I have the tombstones of these mem- ories in Facebook albums and Instagram posts.

I no longer have them where it’s real, but I’ll always have them where it hurts the most.

MARIAH HOUSTON Co-Editor in Chief

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