Belonging threads

I wrote this as paragraph-writing practice alongside my students while we read Joy Buolamwini’s Unmasking AI. Writing with them, rather than only assigning the work, made me examine how I describe belonging and how carefully I distinguish my own experience from Buolamwini’s.

Writing with them is deliberate. Paragraph writing is hard to teach from the board and easy to hide behind a rubric, so I sit down and do the assignment myself — same prompt, same limits, same rough draft. Putting myself in their shoes while doing the work, instead of only asking for it, is how I model what I am actually asking them to do. The draft I share is mine, imperfect and visible, and the room knows it.

I am my own bubble of energy, floating outside the norm. I sit on the outskirts of whatever social village I find myself beside. It is not something I do on purpose. I bump against an invisible wall as my bony elbows push conversation threads aside and try to make space where no space was woven. Somehow the pattern fills in again, leaving me on the outside once more.

I learned early that I do not always fit familiar conversation patterns, rituals, or rhythms. I can be a step off the timing, a beat ahead or behind the group. The belonging thread I try to weave can be snipped by a glare, a gaze, a side-eye, or a shared knowing look across the table that is not for me.

Difference needs to remain precise here. I have not experienced racism like Joy Buolamwini, whose work exposes how race and gender shape who is seen, recognized, and treated as authoritative in technical spaces. My own experiences of social exclusion do not make those harms equivalent. They give me a point of reflection, not a claim to someone else’s experience.

What the comparison asks of me is greater attention to power. A person can feel outside a group for many reasons, but institutions do not distribute that outside position evenly. My responsibility is to notice both: the human ache of not fitting and the larger systems that repeatedly decide whose presence is treated as normal, whose intelligence is welcomed, and whose difference is read as disruption.

This is one reason belonging matters in my research. I want to understand belonging not as a personality trait or a reward for learning the group’s rhythm, but as something people build together. If the thread keeps closing around the same people and cutting others out, the pattern itself deserves examination.