Uncalculated Risks

I calculated how many hours I would have to work to buy her the backpack she wanted. I counted how many logos, gallons of milk, and gas bills before I might fold. I couldn’t stop measuring. I had no choice but to know how much I would have to give up, let go, corral, to receive, sustain, survive. It felt like begging, yet with an accountant’s hand. I ignored the bruises but counted the punches to get the dollars.

These are not miscalculations or accidental beatings. Human lives are deemed uncountable and loss, unfathomable by capitalist and white patriarchal design. It’s irrelevant how many lives are exchanged for deeper bottom lines. And so deep and saturated have the lines become, the deluge of daily blood dripping down into caverns are now the infinity pools of the intrepid few; the intrepid who dare bathe amid the crimson stains of their own blitheness and illusion of expediency.

Privilege, then, is not the number of cars you own, dollars in your account, or bedrooms in your home. It’s the craft of making the numbers disappear. Privilege is a slight of hand, the ability to make measurements superfluous. When you no longer need to know, care to know, or even know that you should know, how much humans and more-than-humans of the natural world give up, pay, toil, bleed so that you can get exactly what you want, is privilege. Any form of myopic living is an indulgence and an abomination.