Key Takeaways: Volunteering Abroad Forced me to Face My Own Privilege
by Izabela Psnik
Link to original article: Volunteering Abroad Forced me to Face My Own Privilege
The article explores the author's experience as a volunteer English teacher in Indonesia and how that experience forced her to confront the often-unspoken, deeply embedded nature of privilege—particularly racial and economic. What stands out in this piece is not a grand, transformative epiphany, but rather the accumulation of small, emotionally charged recognitions—those quiet but undeniable moments where something shifts internally, and can’t be shifted back.
1. Seeing Wealth Through a Different Lens
The first point of tension the author recognises is economic. She recounts being asked by locals about her income back in Australia, only to realise that what she could earn in an hour equated to a month's salary for those around her. There is a flicker of discomfort here—the sudden visibility of a gap not previously examined, a luxury she was being confronted with.
Within this, a second realisation occurs: that what makes Indonesia so attractive to Australian travellers—the affordability of it—becomes inseparable from the inequality it’s built on. There’s no moral lesson delivered here, just a quiet reckoning with how easily we move through spaces made accessible by the very disparities we claim to find unjust.
2. When Being Seen Becomes Being Fetishised
The author’s experience of being noticed—called out as “bule,” photographed without consent, admired for features she never thought remarkable—goes beyond feeling out of place. It is an encounter with being fetishised: her whiteness made both spectacle and symbol. What’s striking is how this visibility forces a confrontation not just with how others see her, but with how she has seen others. She recalls, with uncomfortable clarity, moments of playing tourist—taking photos of strangers, treating difference as something to be captured, owned, and shown off back home.
Being on the receiving end of that gaze feels invasive, even violating. But it also becomes a kind of mirror—reflecting her own position back at her. For perhaps the first time, her race, her privilege, and the global weight of whiteness are not abstract concepts, but embodied realities. Her discomfort is not just about how she’s being seen, but about what that gaze reveals: that her presence, however well-intentioned, carries histories and hierarchies she cannot opt out of.
3. Whiteness as Commodity: Beauty and Power
Beauty standards are also brought to the forefront in the author's journey. The prevalence of whitening creams, the preference for lighter-skinned actors, the praise directed at her simply for looking the way she does—all point to the global reach of Western ideals. But admiration here doesn’t feel flattering; it feels like complicity.
The discomfort is not just in being seen, but in being elevated for embodying something she had no hand in choosing—features inherited, not earned, and yet commodified. Her whiteness functions like currency in this context, and that currency carries a history. The guilt is not performative—it’s a quiet, sharp awareness that her presence reinforces the very hierarchies she might wish to resist.
To be admired for what colonisation left behind is not a compliment—it’s a confrontation. And with it comes the uneasy recognition that some forms of privilege are not only unearned, but also inescapably visible.
4. Shame That Moves: Turning Discomfort Into Change
The common thread running through each of these experiences is shame—a gnawing guilt about her unearned comfort and power. Yet the author comes to recognise that this shame, while tempting to wallow in, can be a catalyst for action. There is no attempt to absolve herself, nor any indulgence in performative guilt. Instead, she writes. She shares. She tries to do something, however small, with the discomfort.
Ultimately, the article doesn’t offer solutions so much as it creates space for complexity. Privilege is neither a confession nor an identity. It is a condition—and what we do with it matters more than how eloquently we apologise for having it.
