(diaryland) May 09, 2013 - 1:14 p.m.

If the world has been racist and sexist since forever, no matter how hard people try to get out of it, it's not a level playing field. And if you ever get an award for something and you're not a white guy, you might think, what is the reason?

I heard that a female scientist was mad that people got mad that no female scientists got a fellowship in some science thing this year. I guess I see her point. You can't give a person an award because of who they are, otherwise, it devalues it. But the whole world is skewed, and that's actually the problem.

The same day, I also heard about a boarding school scholarship that was being given to aboriginal students. That made me feel uneasy for some reason, in that the students may not have the same chance to keep the knowledge of their particular culture intact to the same extent as the people who stay in their own settings.

So many people in Australia are a huge mix of ethnicities and cultures from far away. I sometimes wish I had a sense of belonging to one place, so I think, wow, what would it be like to say, "I'm from this one place. This is what my people are about." It's fun to have a multiplicity of origins sometimes, I guess, but I kinda feel like I'm lying to myself if I decide, yes, this is what I am, because it's always to the exclusion of something else. Like, even if I think, hey, I'm female, it feels like that's at the exclusion of being a person.

But then I realised, that's just me. This scholarship doesn't necessarily have the impact I think it does. Plus, you need people to be able to operate in the lingo of academia so you've got those links there.

You might be able to tell, I'm not like a sociologist or anything. I just wanted to get my feelings out there. And sometimes, I feel fuzzy around the edges, and up against it. I guess everyone feels like that from time to time.