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The word "privilege" never crossed the lips of any teacher of mine.

But as early as kindergarten or first grade, I began to understand that I was a very lucky kid. First, I realized that not everyone had both parents and all their grandparents still alive. Then I learned about divorce and felt blessed that my family was all together. I grew up in Costa Mesa, California, where my parents and their neighbors seemed to live like the people on Family Ties, and went to a Catholic school in nearby Newport Beach, where many seemed to live like the people on The O.C.

I still remember when I first glimpsed beyond that bubble.

One autumn, when I was six or seven, my teacher announced that our class would help provide presents that Christmas for a family that couldn't afford them. We were told the names and ages of a single mother and her five or six children. It wasn't the first time that I'd been exposed to the concept of poverty, but knowing names of kids my age who wouldn't get Christmas presents made it real.

A year or two later, I went to Mexico for the first time. I'll never forget driving across the border into Tijuana (which was safe enough for anyone to do in those days), seeing the shanty towns clinging perilously to dirt hills visible from the highway, and realizing what my parents had meant when they said it was a poor country.

Between family vacations and trips that the Catholic Church sponsored to build houses for poor Mexican families, I knew a lot of kids growing up who most fully grasped their own privilege for the first time in the hours after they crossed our Southern border. And I knew a lot of kids who managed similar insights within Orange County. My Catholic high school required a substantial number of volunteer hours to graduate. Some people served the homeless at soup kitchens. Others worked at hospitals. Still others volunteered to help rich people at fancy dinners nominally held for charity. I fulfilled my requirement as a volunteer at a camp run by the Wheelchair Tennis Association and a counselor at Special Camp for Special Kids. That's when I realized what a privilege it is to be born with a healthy body.

Later still, while attending college in Claremont, California, I began thinking about race and policing as never before when I read the following about a nearby police killing:

Irvin Landrum Jr., 18, died Jan. 17, six days after he was shot three times in the neck, chest and ankle on a sidewalk in the quiet eastern Los Angeles County suburb. One of the officers involved told investigators the shooting was in self defense after Landrum pulled a .45-caliber pistol from his waistband and fired first. But a subsequent investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department showed that the gun Landrum allegedly used was never fired and bore no fingerprints.

Some of my peers organized protests. I wondered, "Would he be alive if he were white?" My effort to report out what really happened as a very green campus journalist failed, but I remember slowly realizing how much more pressure there would've been to find the truth had the dead youth been a student at one of the Claremont Colleges, or had his parents had been wealthy or politically connected in town. That insight ultimately influenced stories I've tried to highlight as a journalist.