Checking my Kikuyu Privilege in the Face of Racism | Maria Mutitu | TEDxWoosongUniversity

today I'm going to invite each and every one of you to do a two-step dance with me as I speak about my own story I would like you to reflect on your own life and see indeed if there are similarities to my own story and see if we can learn this together and let's start here so imagine this you are sitting in a meeting with a few other people talking about life and how difficult things are and you're just whining about everything and the leader of the group says to you you if you tell me what country you're from I would tell you what tribe you're from huh you know so somebody said this to me somebody said this to me and it took me by great surprise but more importantly it startled me and it angered me because I'm in a foreign country I was a freshman in the United States and I was experiencing racism for the first time and racism made me feel small and demeaned it made me feel like I was a second-class citizen and I was sharing my story of pain and here somebody who didn't know me where I was from says to me Maria I see you I know you and after a short period of time this particular person kept talking to me and explaining to me about what was going on and I began to realize things that I hadn't realized before yes Maria for the first time I was so shocked to recognize within myself that I had grown up as a person of a socially privileged group and I was one of those people who treated other people like the Caucasian folks who are treating me the same things that were making me angry and hurt I had participated directly or indirectly in treating other people the same way I was one of those people and you're probably wondering what you a black girl it's true I grew up in Kenya and I grew up as a member of the Kikuyu people of Kenya and this is a bunch of a group of people and it is the largest tribe in Kenya and we are located right in that red spot and it is the highlands of the country but our privilege like most privilege didn't come for any particular beautiful reason except that about so many also years ago the British people came to Kenya as colonialists and chose to privilege one group over the other 42 tribes so they can have better control of the country and that tribe just so happened to be my people the Kikuyu people and why they Kikuyu people because we were centrally placed it was a good place to set up the protective devices to create roads to do business everybody could come through here and for this reason we were privileged we were allowed to participate in the education of the white man we were allowed to wear the clothes of the white man we were allowed to feel which was the most important part we were allowed to feel and believe that we were better than all the other tribes combined and this tension began then and has continued to this day so much so that to this day the Kikuyu people of Kenya are constant we were warring with other tribes and especially one particular tribe on the west coast on the west side of Kenya called the Lua tribe and with this particular tribe which was the second largest tribe at that time and still is we are constantly worrying and we do horrible things my people that accrue you people have no problem calling their customs childish they have no problem calling their men boyish because they do not do things like we do to this day when all of us in the Diaspora the Kikuyu people go to a Kenyan party we have no problem speaking Kikuyu although the other people are there and this is what I have recognized to be privileged people who tend to be privileged have no awareness of what they the space that they're in and that is what as the professor was talking to me I began to realize and grow into and this is where I'm inviting you all to start thinking about areas in your life that you may be privileged one lesson that I began to reflect on and understand very very clearly is that I as a Kikuyu person in my privilege was completely oblivious to this social space that I was in and that I had received so much privileges in resources so much so that my very name just to say my name opened doors my name allowed me to speak like I said in public spaces in my own language and every other person from all the other tribes kept quiet and continues to keep quiet although they are offended my name as a Kikuyu person continues to allow me to have positions in government to this day and this is true of most people of privilege and I believe that is what the professor observe than me I spoke as a person who was oblivious of the position I was holding and that is identifiable by people who have perhaps been on the receiving end of that now following this one was how the level of an awareness that I was I was so unaware of how the other people had to maneuver their lives to fit my obliviousness and I will tell you a little story as I was getting ready for this TED talk at this TEDx talk I talked to a friend of mine who is from another tribe a Kenyan friend from another tribe and now she was talking to me and we were talking first she was very surprised and she said she was shocked that I would be speaking about this you know because you're reflecting on yourself and the next thing she said was when Kikuyu people reflected to her about our awareness it makes her uncomfortable she said she just wants it to go she doesn't want us to keep talking about it it makes her uncomfortable and then she said a word that I never thought would be in reference to me and she said because we seem so fragile we are so we were when whenever she would say you shouldn't say that to me that was tribalist tribalistic what you just said to me even me speaking to her about my awareness and made her feel that I was too fragile she wanted to protect me from my own obliviousness and that was another even right here up to this point I woke up to something else so that level of awareness that other people are working on just to accommodate my own lack of awareness is a lesson that I have learned probably accompanies most people of privilege so and my friend opened my eyes to that and in addition to this I also learned and she explained further to me that the reason why she felt that we were so fragile is because when individuals like her pointed out to me or her friends that we had said an offensive word or that we were not aware of the privileges that were given to us socially or at work or just politically that most individuals were so unwilling to accept their part of the whole so for example as Maria I would say well I'm here I'm willing to listen to you so I'm a good person I cannot be responsible for what all the other Kikuyu people are doing and what I have realized personally is that the Kikuyu people is made up of one person at a time so if I take responsibility another one takes responsibility and all of us take individual responsibility this collectively reforms the entire group of people and then we can all begin to become a little bit aware and to of to fit better into a society of many people so and the last thing that I learned that was the whole startup for this talk right here and projected my life in a different way was that pain almost always is the catalyst for this change had I not experienced racism as bitterly as it was had I not had somebody call me the n-word or somebody say I'm not going to eat with you because you're black or people spray things near me I would never have felt the shame of feeling less than somebody looking at me and judging me purely based on my skin color I would not have felt that this part I want to say maybe is not necessary and once again call anybody here to reflect on your own life and see is there an area of your life where you may be having privilege that you don't understand that or you you might not have been aware of or you didn't know like me that you can begin now before the pain hits before you have to experience something painful like I did let's think about this the kinds of privilege that you might be experiencing you can be academically privileged it's very possible if you've been able to travel and get education that is a huge privilege if you're in your country and you're able to go to school this is a privilege many cannot and we can take that for granted if you have social privilege like I had in your own country or even here this is a privilege that you can believe somebody else is looking at from the outside gender privilege if you're a man versus women there are privileges you have that we as women just would love to be able to do that religious privilege if you are a religious majority anywhere in the world there are others looking in wanting to have the same level of freedom what how can you be aware of your own privilege and how you travel in the spaces of the others and so on and so forth there are many kinds of privileges that each and every one of us is carrying including health health privileges how healthy are you you know are there people around you who are not as healthy and how is that world around how is your world and how is it for them things that we take for granted so to close this up I'm going to encourage each and every one of us like myself to continue to investigate all the different areas of privilege that we have in our own lives that we may not have earned or gain but we have them anyway and let's see how we walk in there I'm very aware now of any space i occupy how I walk in that space who's in that space who I'm hearing who I'm seeing who I'm not seeing in that space who I'm not hearing in that space I try to stay aware to who is in my space so that I never again have to be oblivious or unaware or unwilling to acknowledge how I am traveling in that space around other people thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 27,916

Rating: 4.1221237 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Discrimination, Empathy, Pain, Personal education

Id: 6dutYdoAZZo

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2019