So I told him: "You say so because you are not ugly".
He tried to argue it, but he had to concede that in fact he doesn't know what it feels like to be ugly.
There are many ugly people who have a bad character but they do not allow it to transpire in public because they do not have the privilege of being good looking.
The society is generally not nice to people who are not attractive, so this group of people have no other choice but to feign "niceness" and good morals if they want other people to dignify them with a bit of attention.
My friend ignored this struggle because he is attractive. He has never had to act nice to be liked. People liked him because he is cute and they liked him even more because he was genuinely nice.
Last week, I was telling my friend that I wouldn't have faced most of the shit that I had to deal with if I were Yoruba like her and the majority of Nigerians in that community back in Italy. And she told me that it's not true. She then added that my bad character coupled with my tendency to cause trouble caused them to dislike me.
It was in that moment that I realised that our friendship had reached an impasse. I was stunned that in all those years she has never noticed how my non Yoruba background played against me.
My friend has never been in a situation where she'd be in the midst of people and she'd be the object of their conversation without even knowing.
My friend has never had to physically isolate herself because a group of people made it impossible for her to contribute to the conversation by speaking in a language that she couldn't understand.
My friend has never felt irritated during a Sunday mass because the pastor decided to preach part of his or her sermon in a language foreign to her.
My friend has never had to reaffirm that she has her own language and she needn't learn a new one to be able to communicate with people who could comfortably communicate with her in two different languages.
My friend has never been in a situation where she reacted to an attack and the onlookers chose to focus on her reaction rather than the action that caused because the the attacker was Yoruba while she wasn't.
The members of this Yoruba community were not friends. They didn't even liked one another, but that ethnic background they had in common gave them a sense of unity and confidence.
Even people who weren't Yoruba felt lucky that they could speak the language. At least nobody could cheat them in their presence and they could still manage to disguise themselves.
When two Yoruba people had a fight, the community split into two and each party would have some form of support.
But when a Yoruba person had a fight with a non Yoruba person, the clique automatically sided with the Yoruba person irrespective of who was actually wrong.
For my friend to have called me a trouble maker signified that she too was biased towards me. That is how their privilege clouds their judgement.
One day, a non Yoruba friend of mine sent me a text message after church service. In the text she complained of how she had been shunned out of the group because everybody was speaking Yoruba.
At that point I texted this friend of mine who had called me a trouble maker and was present at the gathering, to correct her over such behaviour.
The result was that all of them turned against my non Yoruba speaking friend and accused her of stirring up drama. My non Yoruba friend was mortified and told me that I shouldn't have said anything.
Sometimes I read posts by some feminists and immediately I notice that they are speaking from a position of privilege. There are many feminists who cannot identify with the struggle of the average Nigerian woman because they have never had to deal with that particular struggle.
Their posts reek of condescension and deliberate misinterpretation.
This was particularly obvious during the #wifenotcook saga. A lot of feminists called the discussion stupid and unimportant.
"There are more important issues to discuss."
Well, congratulations to have been among the few lucky women who were not told that they belonged in their husband's kitchen. Even our first Lady was not that lucky.
Privilege is the equivalent of wearing a blindfold. Yes, some people choose to be deliberate about their blindness, and I think that this set of people are the worst.
However those ones who do not recognise their privilege because they are used to it as a comfortable normalcy need to shaken and awaken.
The same way my friendship with that friend will never work until she recognises her own privilege.
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