Understanding how culture doesn’t explain suffering

Pathologies o Power Chapter 1

I thought once, last week to be exact, that maybe I wouldn't suffer as much if I was born in another culture. After a week of storming the streets of D.C., learned the definitions of “oppression” and “privilege” from my friends from undergrad. I learned that in some ways the culture I was born into, not by choice, instantly places me into this idea of “suffrage”. This is not to say that my parents haven’t suffered in any way. They have been displaced, worked to the bone, at less meals than I have; they have suffered.

What I am trying to understand is why we are quick to say that I have suffered. That in some ways the suffering was not suffering to me. It was masked by the term “work hard for success”. I never thought I was completely suffering. I look back now to the past, I try to think about the ways my father sat us down, told us we would get out of these moments. The moments where we didn't have food, money for electricity, etc. I remember that in one occasion he mentioned that we had to understand that he didn't have privilege because he was not from America. I think remembering this now I can say that in being considered from a particular culture, I do continue to suffer, but I am don’t suffer with the same lens as my father or my mother. I suffer with the pre conceived notion that I have work hard. Just because my father was a young adult immigrant from Guatemala, or my mother an 11 year old immigrant from El Salvador doesn't mean their culture equals or attributes to suffrage. I think I am most bothered by this because we are quick to attribute the emotion of being part of a 3^rd world “culture” as haven suffered. I do agree though with the statement made after this claim “…it may at worst furnish an alibi.” (49). I think to some degree we must wait for the suffering to be explained. It must be elaborated on. It must be owned. If someone doesn't want to be classified as oppressed or gone through some type of limitation we must wait for that classification to be done by the prospective person.