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These are important questions not just for at best. What knowledge do we own? When is children’s literature, but for our everyday lives. knowledge personal and when is it objective? Can Who has the right to conversations about identity have authority on a really be objective? How Can conversations topic or a background? can we study or understand How do we recognize, about identity really be oppressed identities when respect, and take part our education system is in conversations about objective? How can we steeped in a dominant culture, background study or understand culture traditionally known and identity? These as oppressive? questions, especially oppressed identities when the last one, feel more our education system is I’m concerned with having like something that the right to write, if and when steeped in a dominant you might read in an I have the right to speak an incredibly crappy team culture traditionally known opinion that impacts people building pamphlet. outside myself. I’m also as opressive? In academia, they’re concerned with articulating frequently rhetorical. and opining on sexuality We ask them to prove when what I believe, think, that we’re thinking about them, not because we and feel is both complicated and private. I don’t have all the answers, or any of them for that matter. want to put my sexuality on display, and I don’t want to define it for anyone else. This is a luxury I want to keep the insider/outsider dichotomy in that I have and I find it incredibly disheartening mind though. If we are challenging ourselves and that I have this luxury. The luxury to not have to what we know we are consistently outsiders in identify. The luxury to marry my now partner. The our lives-- learning to navigate situations where luxury to not have to explain my sexuality in order we are uncomfortable, unsure, and frequently to fight for equality. out of place. I find that many people I’ve met choose to socialize and live in homogeneous It seems that, ironically, in order for things to communities that enforce instead of challenge the become equal we have to categorize them. We insider/outsider divide. I don’t blame them, it’s can’t be colorblind, genderblind, sexualityblind, comforting, it’s encouraging, it’s survival. we have to be aware of the gross inequalities that are happening to specific, defined populations. I am a gay rights advocate. I am a feminist. I am Given this need for awareness, however, it student of critical race theory. I think about these becomes difficult to be a person that straddles things in my day to day life, I read about them, identities instead of a person that fits the prescribed I talk about them, I try to understand what I can definition. In a system where we are all clearly do to promote them. But I know none of this is defined and marked as this or as that, being a enough, I can be an ally, I can push for equality, person who questions definitions marks you as a but I do not have the right to write, nor the right perpetual outsider. Even when we incorporate a to speak as if I know what hasn’t been my lived gray identity into mainstream thinking, we create experience. another category for it, making it another accepted definition rather than a process of understanding There are enough books to sink an aircraft carrier ourselves. on being an ally to communities, on supporting equality even though your identity may be from I worry about identifying. I worry about being an the dominant culture. I’m not writing anything new uncomfortable mix of outsider and insider. I worry about being an ally, but I think that talking about about the luxury of privacy, and if I really have the the insider/outsider divide in terms of knowledge right to write about anything at all. ownership is something that is done infrequently