The roundtable discussion last week made me realise for the first time how much my position in the world affects me every day. Jemima mentioned how minorities start out in life from a place of inequity. Every day they deal with opinions like those we saw cause the Christchurch shooting. But, because of my privileged position – middle-class Pākeha – and because I don’t personally have to deal with inequity affecting me, the issue had never crossed my mind.
This scared me a little; how could I have never noticed how much my place in the world affects all my thoughts and opinions? Of course, I am aware of the difficulties minorities face and have faced all throughout history, but the deep-rooted nature of personal identity is something that goes with us everywhere we go. This is something I didn’t fully realise until our speakers started discussing these issues last week.
So, when thinking about research, I realise now how important it is to take a step back and consider not only other people’s positions, but also our own position. It’s like we are all automatically given a pair of glasses when we are born, and what we see out of them depends fully on our social, cultural and familial situations, things which we have no control over when we are born. Perhaps we need to learn how to take our glasses off and acknowledge the types of glasses that everyone else has been given to wear.
