The Soapbox

I don’t want to be rare. I don’t be want to be tokenized, valued to a heightened degree and put on a pedestal because of aspects of my identity I was born with or because of the ways I challenge expectations in my field.

I now put conscious effort into decolonizing myself by challenging gender binary expectations. Even though I sometimes catch myself saying sorry when I shouldn’t, speaking too softly, or moving to the side to let men pass, I am self-conscious of those actions.

Up until this point I had been ignorant of the fact that my whiteness granted me greater social mobility and access to parties. My white privilege meant that I was never subject to any kind of racial profiling. It meant that I would never have to consider how profiling affected people of color and other marginalized students within the Greek community — until it happened to my friends.

Something about being around other women in STEM — women who looked like me, women with similar aspirations and who had ultimately succeeded — meant the world to me. It gave me a sense of confidence in my abilities.

I’m not ashamed of disclosing my sexual orientation anymore. I now can confidently take my girlfriend’s hand and kiss her in public and no longer tremble when someone condemns me, saying I’m going to hell or calls me a bull dyke.

Being in Greek life should be an opportunity to surround yourself with people you connect with — a way to spend time outside of school doing things you enjoy. I chose my sorority because I loved the company of so many women in the house, and I still do. But spending my weekends in houses full of strangers, waiting for the party to end made being in Greek life feel more like a job I paid to participate in than the inclusive community I had hoped for.

It didn’t matter that these girls were brilliant creators selected into the startup incubator for the projects they had led. To the men around me, they were simply sexual objects, with worth directly esteemed from their attractiveness rather than their technical abilities.

Living in a sorority began to feel like taking one step toward adulthood and then three steps back. Looking back now, I could never imagine myself in a house where my male friends were banned from my room after 10, and I was subject to an overbearing housing contract. To me, it felt like in order to assure that no girls broke Panhellenic trust, we were simply not given any trust to begin with.

Laughing with friends in seminar as we talked about the importance of self-care, cheering as Ruth Bader Ginsburg came on screen as we all watched “On the Basis of Sex” and planting flowers in our community garden were always the highlights of my week. They reminded me of everything good when it felt like things were going wrong, assuring me of my place in STEM when the intensity of Berkeley CS made me doubt my competence.

It took me a long time to challenge Eurocentric beauty ideals. But now, I am able to look in the mirror and see a real person, a person who is no longer submissive to European ideologies. I am now able to face myself.