Among the many amazing topics we have discussed throughout this class, Identity Politics has to be one of my favorites. I have often found myself wondering why people don’t share the same views I do when it comes to gender, sexuality and race. I was briefly seeing this guy who later told me male privilege and white privilege don’t exist. I tried to explain to him why he was wrong, surprised at how he couldn’t see something so apparent. When I tried to explain why he was wrong, upset by his refusal to understand, he said, “this is why I hate politics, it divides people”. This statement felt interesting to me because I didn’t think I had said anything that would be considered political. I was simply recounting my experience as a woman of color. It took me a while to understand that my existence itself was political. My personal decision to have a kid or not is a debate on the “declining femininity and motherhood in modern women”, my choice to flirt with a man in a bar is grounds for discourse on rape culture, my skin tone a measure for who am I and what I believe in. After learning about identity politics, I now see why it was easy for a straight, white man to not care as much (or even a little) about race and gender like I did. It doesn’t affect him either way so he can happily ignore and he can easily say “why can’t people just live together as humans, with no tags”, while I cannot do the same if I ever want to see myself considered an equal to him.