Let’s talk about status.

United States Sen. Alex Padilla was tackled and cuffed at a Department of Homeland Security press conference taking place in his legislative backyard.

You’ve seen the footage. He identified himself.

“U.S. senator,” he said.

And they responded like: “Cool story, bro. Face down.”

Meanwhile, in Montebello, Hawthorne and Pico Rivera, American citizens are being swept up in ICE raids. They protest: “I was born here!” Show papers. But still handcuffed, then van stuffed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a senator or a citizen. If you look like you don’t belong, your status can be discarded in an instant.

That’s the thing about status: it feels like armor, but it’s not. It’s more like a party wristband. Flashy, flimsy and dependent on someone else letting you in. And once they decide you don’t belong, you’re out, leather jeggings be damned.

I learned this the hard way. No, the jeggings weren’t mine.

Several years back, I got a seatbelt ticket around the corner from my grandmother’s house in unincorporated Bassett. No big deal. I meant to pay it but life got messy. Missed my court date. Which turned into a failure to appear. Which turned into a bench warrant. Which turned into three nights in L.A .County’s Men’s Central Jail.

“Can someone call my mommy?”

Look, when you’re in a cold, fluorescent processing tank with 40 other dudes and no clothes, you start reaching for comfort.

And I reached for status.

I told myself: This is a mistake. I’m a celebrated high school teacher. A cherished Sunday school leader. A seminary graduate. I’ve written for television, for crying out loud! (OK, it was deep cable and nobody watched, but still.)

Having once written food reviews for the Occidental student paper, I had the temerity to identify my occupation as a journalist, as if to suggest a hard-hitting exposé would follow if my dignity was trampled. I figured any second, some sheriff’s deputy was going to come around with a clipboard and say, “Excuse me, Sir Aguilar. This is clearly beneath you.” Nope.

Because in that cell, I wasn’t a teacher or a writer or any damn thing. I was just one more Aguilar on a list. Another ego stripped bare.

That kind of humiliation incarceration deals you doesn’t leave. But maybe it teaches you something.

We spend our lives chasing status: degrees, titles, follower counts, Teslas, whatever, thinking it’ll insulate us. But it can’t stop ICE from mistaking you. Can’t stop a court from minimizing you. Can’t stop a system never built with you in mind.

The cruelest irony? The higher you climb, the more humiliating the fall.

Padilla rightfully thought his senatorial credentials and MIT pedigree offered protection. Instead, he was treated like a nuisance. I thought my resume would at least get me moved to some “low-risk” holding tank. Instead, I got gang-regulated toilet bowls. But here’s the twist: humiliation can birth humility. Humility can be clarifying. You stop thinking you’re above the people around you and start realizing you are them. Humility is a virtue, a noble aim, an end in and of itself. But each path toward humility must travel the dusty, bumpy and trash-riddled road of humiliation. At the risk of sounding tautological: if you want to be humble, you have to be humbled. There’s no way around it.

But there’s solidarity in a cell. And on the receiving end of a slur. And beneath the knee of an overweight cop. Wherever people are doing unto you what you had never considered doing unto them. So what’s the lesson?

Instead of investing in the thin veneer of status, we invest in people, in all their potentiality. Maybe we stop measuring worth by credentials and start by recognizing our dignity is grounded in a shared humanity.

Maybe we take up that age old edict to only do unto others what we’d have them do unto us.

Because status will fail you. But humility? That’ll remind you who your people are. And that’s the beginning of real power.

Carlos Aguilar is editorial director at Quantasy and Associates, an ad agency in downtown Los Angeles, teaches at Occidental and lives in Covina.