Part of The Interview

Woah, it was a wild 11 days from Hi to Hired with X University in Colorado.  But as a small town girl from Dunedin, who found warmth in the coals James K Baxter stoked and stroked in the fireplaces up Russell Street, consider my mind blown I get to work at such a special treasured place ❤  With Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as cofounders and original faculty, woah, same halls, woah. One of the questions they asked me during the 5 hour interview process, was how do you see the Privileged position and how do you see the Oppressed.  I had been ready for these kinds of questions, and i took my mind back to 1981, when I was a young sapling.  Seminal moments that speak to the core of one and their being.
It was 1981, and the public were uprising and there was organized marching in New Zealand to stop the South African Springboks from playing their apartheid supporting international rugby on our fields, we wanted them to free Nelson Mandela, and the protest was upon us.  The front rows of the march lines wore motorbike helmets.  Civil unrest like we had never seen was spreading through the small isolated country. Crop dusting planes were dropping flour bombs while performing low fly overs of the sports ground, Police in riot gear were bashing on civilians exercising their rights, the players beds in hotels were being made with broken glass between the sheets. And Male homosexuality was illegal, lesbianism was not.
We were marching for Human Rights as some friends were the Oppressed, the right to love who you love. I’m telling this to the Diversity committee as part of my interview for a financial job, I doubt either of them were born in 1981.  I remember watching a teen ginger march past in the Albuquerque Pride parade a couple of years back with heels on, I was just an invisible middle-aged woman lacking fabulousity.  I wondered if he realized that we had all fought for his freedoms that he was celebrating, decades ago.  But I am blonde, white, blue-eyed, educated and heterosexual, I am coming from a place of privilege.  This night, I was marching with the Oppressed. I recognized this, and so it is the story I tell.
As a blonde, blue-eyed youth, I was marching next to my gay friends, confused as to why it was illegal and understanding an imbalance was in place.  They could be imprisoned for just saying they were homosexual, let alone being able to openly love.  As a teen, I was learning that having a voice mattered. So it’s 1981, walking down the main street of Scottish Dunedin, George St, banners held high, heading to the Robbie Burns statue in the middle of town.  It’s a town of about 100k, and I think almost a 1000 people turned up to march.  It was empowering to be part of the collective with a common human goal. Let’s Legalize Love.  And we marched, down the cold winter’s Friday night, down Main Street, Dunedin.  John and David with me, I think Amanda was there too.
And as we marched down hometown main street, a place of safety in my life. For the first time, I felt the sting of the Oppressed on my skin, and the hate they must have had to endure on a daily basis.  The scared, and the hateful, the threatened, they came out and jeered.  Old ladies with foul mouths, bogans and their mullets, kids we went to school with. It was 1981, our Tellie was still censored, but times were changing in the deep south. As we passed, tomatoes and eggs were thrown at us, and we marched, they laughed as the egg rolled down our heads, but we marched.  There were a few stones thrown, but mainly it was jeering, hate, fear, in a high pitched wave pounding on us.  Words were screamed in our faces “Faggots, Gay, Ass Bandits “. As we approached the Octagon and Robbie Burns’s perch, we saw men stumbling out of the bar on the corner of the entrance. Drunks lurching out from the European bar, their fists swinging into the crowd, no one using their words.  They stumbled into the marchers, lurching, disrupting and hateful.  I’m 15, and we marched on, relentless. We didn’t change the law that year, or the next, but it was gone within 5 years.

So that’s what I told the Diversity and Inclusion committee about my seeding knowledge/example of Oppressed and Privileged. Coming from the first country in the world to give women the vote 1893.  First country to elect transsexual into government 1999, I did tell them it seemed weird to be asked about it, but having lived here for 17 years, I understood there are problems in the US. Let love in.