An Autoethnography
‘My dear Bilbo! Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’ —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Hello. It's been a while. It may be strange to hear from a travel blogger years after the last flight, but this is an addendum I feel must be put to print. This is a declaration of war, and this is an apologia. I think I'd better start from the top. I spent the decade from 2009 to 2019 traveling and teaching in Europe and Asia. This experience shaped both my choice to become an educator and my understanding of the privileges and inequities associated with my constellated identity. My membership in a dominant social group—White, male, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, healthy, able, and middle-class—to a large extent facilitated and structured this wanderjahr , and I have often mistaken for intrepidity and assertiveness the underlying racially-ordered assumption that I will be understood, respected, safe, found attractive, and given access. This assumption is