Race, Class and White People’s Beach Houses: On Talking to Privileged People About Privilege

feature image via shutterstock

[This article was inspired by my participation in a talk back following a staged reading of Sarah Schulman’s “Roe V Wade.” It was watching white folks talk about class issues that prompted this piece and the knowledge that Schulman continues to be the catalyst for these conversations inspired me to submit it for publication.]

If It Takes Comparing Beach Houses: A Message to White Feminists on Acknowledging Class to Talk About Race

The first spring break my freshman year of high school, my friend Cynthia* invited me to spend the week with her and her family in Nags Head, North Carolina at their beach house in the Outer Banks. I’d never known anyone whose family owned a “summer home” before. My parents had just moved me into our new home so I could attend the local arts high school and I quietly discovered that many of the upper class kids in my new suburban neighborhood owned multiple pieces of property purely for activities like golfing, skiing and tanning. I joked that our house, a three bedroom rambler not far from Cynthia’s, was our “every season” home, instead of quietly confessing how my mom and step-dad had to request mortgage payments from our in-laws as a wedding gift in order for us to move out of our apartment and into our first and only house.

Cynthia’s family spent years pooling money to own their beach house — her mother working summers at a camp for special needs kids in addition to her school year job and her father pulling extra hours at his construction job — just so they could join the upper echelon of their rich, white peers. Cynthia added just how much longer it took for them to raise enough funds to install an elevator in the house so her wheel chair bound grandmother could join the family each year.

“My parents worked their asses off for that house,” she said, “Not all of us were born with silver spoons, like some people.”

I knew Cynthia was talking about Margaret. The Blakes owned a beach house in the same Nags Head resort development as Cynthia’s and they spent every summer of their childhood walking down to the water, shopping at the kitschy, overpriced ocean front stores and pretending to like each other. They were the kind of friends that had to be because their mothers were. Cynthia and Margaret’s mothers met in college, before Margaret’s mother ended up marrying and soon divorcing one of the owners of the largest meat packing companies in the country. She had since remarried some hot shot professor who could afford to support Margaret and her two brothers, not only through his inheritance, but with a tenured position at a prestigious university in downtown DC. I wasn’t sure what these mothers had in common aside from their history and the birth of their youngest daughters but it was clear that after marriages and babies, their relationship had evolved into one ups-(wo)menship — whose husbands, children, houses, cars where better than the other.

So the Linstrums became part of the Outer Banks fold when they purchased their summer home and Cynthia invited me. This was a big deal in the group of girls I hung out with, one of whom was Margaret. Not surprisingly, her family was spending their break at their beach house too and I assumed hers was most likely bigger and fancier, like everything else she owned. If I was going to spare myself from having a story-less spring break, I knew I had to take Cynthia up on her offer. I knew Margaret would never formally invite me to her beach house. That wasn’t her style, especially when she took after her mother whose nose was too high in the air to even offer you a glass of water.

I was happy to accompany Cynthia to the beach, if not only to stay in a place with a hot tub. I accepted the invitation after reminding myself that my face would probably be the only Black one I would see for the entirety of my spring break. I didn’t tell Cynthia that since I had already learned by then that she wouldn’t understand it.

After an excruciatingly hot six-hour drive with Cynthia and her family, her father pulled their beat-up mini-van into the driveway of a humble, cedar wood two-story beach house with a wrap-around porch and a backyard of sand. It was the same size as her “everyday” home, with beach and Linstrum family trinkets lining the walls and a kitchen/living room/den area centered by a wooden table worn from years of evening meals. My room was on the second floor next to Cynthia’s and we could both step out on the porch from our sliding glass doors and look out at the ocean.

I had not yet fully grasped the comfort-ability of money until I stared out at the neighboring houses, mansion sized wonders that lined the beach, houses that were big enough for Cynthia’s to fit inside several times over. These homes defined wealth, all three to five stories with every amenity imaginable to a summer’s worth of expensive bliss. Even though Cynthia’s house paled in comparison, it still stood amongst them overlooking the expanse of the sea that glistened and roared at their collective feet.

It took three days for Margaret to call and invite us over to visit her house. Cynthia and I were fine with playing the waiting game, knowing we would be required to spend time with her as per family friend tradition. So when she invited us to come by and go into town with her, we rolled our eyes, said yes and asked Cynthia’s license-holding sister to make the five minute drive over to Margaret’s part of the neighborhood. Her sister begrudgingly agreed, rolling her eyes as if it were contagious, and drove us over. The car stopped in front of a bright blue four-story home with white trim, each floor lined with decks connected by a flight of stairs above the entryway of the house. The first deck spilled over the side yard where the Blake family pool, hot tub and outdoor shower overlooked the ocean view. The window of the fourth floor had its own private balcony, reminding me of Romeo’s lamenting Juliet, as if the house itself fell out of some modern version of families feuding for power.

The class tension between Margaret and Cynthia was almost palpable. You could see it in their posture, Cynthia’s eyes downcast as we toured the interior of the house, tiptoeing past the crystal glass vases on almost every table top. A set of china plates in an antique display case lined the entryway and a fabergé egg sat proudly on the mini grand in the living room no one was allowed to sit at. Margaret’s mother was on a business call having tea and finger sandwiches on one of the decks outside, so we filed through the foyer to the sitting room designated for house guests. Margaret was showing me her step-father’s antique ship models carefully placed on wall shelves, oblivious to the fact that I was more fascinated to discover that white people actually had such time-consuming hobbies like building tiny, detailed boats. Cynthia stuffed her face with extra finger sandwiches, bored to tears, as if she’d heard the story of the Blake’s prize model yacht one hundred and fifty times.

Not coincidentally, that spring break was the first time I’d ever read a book about poor white people. Before then, I wasn’t even sure if they existed.

After the grand finale of Margaret’s tour, a brief visit to the third floor cigar room, we piled into Cynthia’s sister’s car and drove to town to cruise the tourist shops. The popular Outer Banks spot was a family friendly outdoor mall sporting a combination of clothing, jewelry and souvenir stores, pandering to both beach residents and seasonal visitors. I was too fat to fit into any of the Hollister beachwear Margaret and Cynthia were dying to try on. Whether I wanted to feel bad about my body as Margaret slipped into her bright pink two-piece wasn’t even worth the self-loathing sense that I couldn’t afford to buy any of the clothing anyway.

One thing about me that has not changed since high school aside from the fact that I am still, and now shamelessly, fat, is that no matter how tight I am for money, I can always scrape up enough cash to buy a book.

Lucky for me, both Margaret and Cynthia were book lovers too so we stopped by the one place I knew I could afford: the local bookstore. It was the smallest shop in the mall with a tiny collection of titles in no particular genre and I stumbled across Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.”

I took two straight days of my spring break, laid in my guest room bed and devoured the book. McCourt meagerly survives his poverty stricken childhood in 1930’s Limerick City, Ireland, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose only choice was to turn to the help of the church to feed her three small children. I’d never read about the gritty wasteland of Ireland during the great depression, never heard of another white family living like my grandmother did in the south, with one set of clothes, dumpster food and failing health, and I certainly hadn’t read a book where the main white male character had suffered so much hardship before the age of nineteen. I was definitely learning about the white history of America back at school but none of my teachers were talking about poor, white immigrants. They weren’t talking about the fact that poverty and class affects white people in America too.

As a fifteen year old I didn’t think to question why I’d never heard any discourses on white people affected by poverty. At the time I barely realized how systematically connected race and class are. I didn’t even realize what it really meant to be the only Black face in a wealthy vacation town. I didn’t have the feminist thinking to question gender roles, to be outraged that woman were forced to watch their children suffer because they were socially barred from working. All I knew was that my friends’ families were passively fighting about the size of their beach houses while I was bonding with the story of a poor white Irish kid.

Now here’s the thing about this big beach house vs. little beach house conversation: we are still talking about beach houses. I am still comparing beach houses while a majority of people of color, single women, LGBT couples, war veterans, mentally ill and poor white folks struggle to find sustainable, affordable housing; while cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland and Detroit are flooded with empty, abandoned houses whose stoops are the only things keeping the sleeping homeless upright; while the President and congress continue to battle over how to provide housing security for the shrinking middle class continually threatened by the market crash of ‘08.

I am talking about beach houses because sometimes I think it is the only example that upper class white people can easily understand when talking about issues of class. It’s my hope that those conversations about class will lead to ones about race.

The best race conversations I have had with white people have been with those who understand class, acknowledge their privilege regardless of their experience, and listen. Even if they didn’t understand my Black experience—which I only assure them they never will—they understand what it’s like to be systemically disenfranchised. And they understand that even though they may have grown up poor, they still have privilege based on their white complexion.

They realize that their inability to understand my Black experience is not a free pass to avoid their responsibility in stopping the acts of racism and classism they witness on a daily basis.

The observation of white people actually grappling with ideas of class amongst each other empowers me, but it empowers me even more when I know they’re having the same conversation even when I’m NOT in the room.

Being a white, feminist ally is not about being recognized for one’s good work, being congratulated or receiving an honorarium. It’s about saying what needs to be said without any expectation of recognition, simply because it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to stand up for voices missing in the room, the same voices that are easily ignored when they are present. The white allies I trust the most are the ones I know are talking about race not only for the benefit of the people of color in the room but for the benefit of their white peers.

If white folks took the time to talk about class matters in their own communities, then maybe they will start moving one step closer to understanding how racism functions in this country.

If it takes comparing beach houses to get white people to talk about class matters, then I’ll refrain from sighing and rolling my eyes to have the conversation. I will talk beachfront real estate and Abercrombie flip-flops, just to get another white person to think about someone who might not have as much as they do.

It’s a skill I learned after spring break my freshman year: the ability to call white women out on their racist bullshit. It’s something you learn when you have to do it all the time, without warning, even when you don’t want to. I do it until I fool myself into thinking it’s easy.

It’s so easy, even you can do it.

*Cynthia Linstrum and Margaret Blake are pseudonyms


About the authorAshley Young is a black feminist queer dyke; poet, non-fiction writer and teaching artist. She is a non-fiction 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow and a 2010 Poetry Fellow for Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Retreat for Writers of Color. She is the author of a chapter in Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion edited by Virgie Tovar (Seal Press 2012) and her queer feminist prose and poetry has been featured on Elixher.comHer Circle Ezine, Rkvry Quarterly Literary Journal and Shuomii Life. Ashley works as an editorial assistant at Riverdale Ave Books and is working on her first novel. She lives in New York City with her partner and family, including a pride of four cats.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Ashley Young

Ashley has written 1 article for us.

40 Comments

  1. This piece is so fantastic. As someone who has an immense amount of privilege, even as an LGBT woman, I always try my best to acknowledge it and take others down for their misapprehensions about an ‘even playing field.’

  2. I absolutely loved this! I’ve actually used class issues to bring up discussions about race before, as many people in Ireland simply don’t know how to relate to race issues.
    The country is undergoing a huge change, I’m 24 and come from the last generation that could include people who remember the first time they saw a POC in real life. That is not to say they had ignored POC, just that in certain rural areas of the country the population was 100% white. It’s only in the last 15-20 years, and the advent of the Celtic Tiger that people began to emigrate here and not the other way round.
    I’m totally going to link this article to anyone I have this conversation with next, thanks so much!

    • i’m an american living in ireland and i’ve really grappled with explaining racial inequality in the states, as i get asked about it a fair amount. i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to make class comparisons, but damn, am i gonna use it next time.

  3. “If it takes comparing beach houses to get white people to talk about class matters, then I’ll refrain from sighing and rolling my eyes to have the conversation.”
    Yes! Also when we’re talking to people in the kind-of-elusive middle class, this is an important thing to remember. Thanks for this article Ashley!

  4. Thank you! I struggle with the question of alliance a lot. How does one be a great ally and not come off sounding like “I’m the great white savior?!”

    • I’m not sure how you might avoid “sounding” like something, except perhaps by making sure you don’t think of yourself that way or act that way. If you do, perhaps you have a profound misapprehension of the role of an ally in a struggle. Introspection and lots of reading might be helpful.

    • The response I’ve received from most people of any group that I would call myself an ally is: “let us tell our stories, and you support our voices.”

    • I struggle with this in my work in diversity affairs and my interest and study (hopefully future work!) on protection of intangible culture with a heavy focus on indigenous issues globally. I think that your comment shouldn’t be viewed with hostility, but is a legitimate fear. It’s just in how you go about your work, and dispelling that “Great White Savior” notion that got everyone into this bullshit in the first place.

      But pale-complected people shouldn’t feel barred from the work or barred from discussing their role in the situations because then we’d all be losing that help, and it’s often good help! I think it’s just important to erase that “savior” paradigm from your mind, because people don’t need to be saved by you, they need to be supported in working through these issues.

      I think the answer is a lot in this quote from the article:
      “Being a white, feminist ally is not about being recognized for one’s good work, being congratulated or receiving an honorarium. It’s about saying what needs to be said without any expectation of recognition, simply because it is the right thing to do.”

      I think it’s about realizing the inefficiency of dwelling on oppression olympics (the opposite of comparing beach houses), and the efficiency of simply recognizing your privilege and checking yourself often and recognizing what the author said so well: that we will never understand her experience. That doesn’t mean we can’t treat her and everyone else like the people they are, and we should. It doesn’t mean we have to not do awesome things with these people with different experiences from ourselves. It’s just about doing what needs to be done.

      So as long as you don’t discuss it in that way: expecting or feeling deserving of that “savior” style praise… (Do not Eve Ensler this shit).

  5. Thank you for this article. At one time, my own class background as lower-working class or poor (depending on when you’re asking) was something that got in the way of my understanding of my white privilege. Specifically, this was partially because the analysis presented to me (by much more class-privileged white folks) sort of subsumed class in race. In other words, my first contact with anyone who could talk about privilege was with middle and upper class white people who tended to see other white people as automatically similarly situated, economically speaking, and spoke to them as such.

    This is of course another facet of white privilege: my white skin makes others assume that I have more money than I do. I can blend in a little bit in middle and upper class environments, but i feel painfully displaced inside. I am aware of my background (growing up in a camper, then trailer, then a very shabby house), my current income, and I know how my class has affected me. I am awed by the big houses like the one you describe. I try not to stare, I notice the rips in my clothing all of a sudden.I feel like I’m a glaringly out of place person. It doesn’t take a mansion; I feel this way even in typical working and middle class homes.

    Other white people who are also poor & working class, especially around here in central Maine where the population is overwhelmingly white, have been confused by the idea that they have white privilege. I see intersectionality as the key to clarifying this misunderstanding, but to make it applicable there has to be a class analysis. The white straight man is supposed to be on top of the heirarchy, but I see men like this suffering from deep poverty, addiction & alienation. An analysis without class isn’t going to elict anything more than a knee jerk reaction from them. And I don’t blame them for that.

    • Privilege is more than money. It’s about the assumption of goodness, the benefit of the doubt white straight males recieve.

  6. I have always found within class or ‘race’ privilege fascinating.

    I reckon it is pretty fluid, like the atmosphere and sexuality and stuff.

  7. “It’s about saying what needs to be said without any expectation of recognition, simply because it is the right thing to do.”

    THIS THIS THIS
    ::slow clap::

  8. This was remarkable! Thank you for giving voice to a conversation that is not had nearly enough.

  9. sometimes the amount of racism and classism i feel around me feels too enormous and suffocating for me to even begin to deal with.
    thank you for this.

  10. Thanks for this piece! I always found it frustrating when talking about white privilege a usually (white) privileged person would use class as a “trump card” to dismiss discussion about the real repercussion of racism because poor white people exist. Funny enough when talking about class, they are silent.

    It is very important to talk about these privileges because intersectionality is key to getting the full picture of the structural racism and classism that goes on in our society.

  11. This conversation is key in getting to the root of the symbolic forms of racism and how they impact our current class structure. I admire how well you articulated a great way to connect on these issues and I loved this article so very very much.

  12. Thank you for this– and especially for noting that just because one grows up poor and white and doesn’t have class privilege, that doesn’t negate their white privilege. I feel like I know too many working class or poor white folks or who grew up working class or poor who think that somehow erases their privilege based on skin color. Sometimes I don’t really even know what to say to them as, to me, it so clearly doesn’t’– no matter how much my family struggled to put food on the table when I was growing up, I could still walk into a local drugstore and not be followed by security or drive at night and not be pulled over for really minor or even non-existent infractions. Or even just that I live in a world where I can go buy “nude” pantyhose or “flesh-colored” Bandaids –and they always mean white.

  13. This was a really excellent essay. It’s prompted me to start thinking more about class privileges, and how that’ll affect people as well on top of the gender-sexuality-race layers that I’m already integrating into my filter.

  14. i loved this article. having grown up in the black middle class but knowing the struggles my parents and grandparents made to get there and still struggle with, i have to even remind myself these things sometimes. let me commend you straddlers, i was SO afraid to scroll down to these comments. i do not even skim comments on most sites when related to anything involving race, privilege, and class. i dont have the heart for the trolls. yet you ladies are just the epitome of keeping it classy! kudos!

  15. This article was great!
    But for me what you described was already known fact.
    I am the daughter of two teachers (in my country (France) teachers don’t make a lot of money) and I consider myself being from the middle class but this point of view can change considering with who I am.
    Growing up I lived in a really poor neighbourhood, more than a half of the people were immigrants or second generation of immigrants and me with my (relatively) white skin wad considered as a rich kid. They assumed that my parents made a lot of money, because they were white, even though we were just middle or even low-middle class. My origins are italians and romanians, poor people who came to France because it was better than their coutries at the time, 50 years ago. When they arrived they were treated like sh*t but now that there are “new” immigrants mostly from Africa and north Africa they (we)have the privilege to be not just poor but white. It’s terrible. Suddenly we weren’t that bad, ok we were poor and immigrants but at least we were white. So in me neighbourhood I was a privileged kid.
    After that we moved in a rich part of town, all white, all house owners when my parents spent half their both pay to afford the rent of a 2 rooms sized condo.
    In my new high school I wasn’t the rich white anymore I was the “poor” kid,white but with italian and romanian origins. All my classmates had big house with swimming pools and secondary houses in snow resort towns. All their parents were doctors, succesful real estate agent or lawyers.
    So yes class privilege and race are totally inseparable. And I think the worst problem is that nobody takes the time to look at their neighbour and try to understand their situation.
    P-S: I hope I was clear, pardon my english.

  16. Really great article! I am currently working on a project
    at my high school that is looking at Whiteness and what it means to be white culturally, skin tone wise and personal identity wise. In our research class has been the one topic that we have barely discussed. However as much as a poor white has privilege from there whiteness their poverty will also prevent them from being able to fully participate in “white society” because of their lack of funds. While poverty does not negate whiteness it does change what it means to be white.

  17. Great job on this article, I loved it! As I came out last year, I started to realize just how much white (and cisgender) privilege I had and how that affects my ability to be “out” more easily in most settings than other people.

    Some white people think that by not discussing race they are above it or “don’t see it,” but I’m so glad this article stressed the importance of discussing this power structure and how we all might be a part of it.

  18. Thank you for this amazing article! I grew up as a poor white kid surrounded by wealthy, white families and learned at a young age how different our lives were. Yet, I was always assumed to be wealthy since I was white and went to the same school as them. One summer I was staying at my girlfriend’s vacation house with her and her family, and had a really awkward conversation with one of their family friends, a straight, white, 50-something man about how annoying it is to come home to your beach house after months of being away, only to find that the maid had forgotten to cover a piece of furniture. I feigned understanding and nodded in agreement all the while in my head I was thinking about how at my house growing up, you were lucky if you were sitting on the part of the couch that didn’t have a giant tear in the fabric. It made me sick when I thought about it afterwards, how I’d let him assume I was like him, when I know in my heart that I could never and would never want to be like him, when all I really wanted to do was ask him if it was easy to have so much when SO many have so little. I also still struggle with the fact that for every time I’m assumed to be wealthy because of my skin color, there are probably scores of people of color who are assumed to be poor because of the way they look. And how ultra-fucked up is that?! I can’t even imagine what kind of bullshit comes with dealing with that on a constant basis.

  19. This article is amazing. Thank you so much, Ashley, for putting into words a lot of the ambivalence I have felt recently.

    In January, I moved to my family’s lakeside summer cabin, a move partly motivated by my relatively small income, but which also seriously facilitated my dissertation research. As a young, queer, white woman, living in a tourist destination in the off season, I have definitely felt a lack of community here, but my discomfort at living here extends beyond this, too.

    The area I live in is unceded Indigenous territory (like most of BC, it’s not treatied), and the lake I live next to is both historically and spiritually important to local First Nations. But all of my neighbours, without exception that I have so far seen, are older, white, and conservative (admittedly, I’m assuming this last part, based on this riding’s voting record). If people do think seriously about the intersections between class and race here at this lake, it is completely invisible on the landscape. It’s not just about class, race, and privilege here, it’s also about the importance of an acknowledgement of centuries of dispossession of Indigenous peoples and colonial territorial appropriation, especially at a moment when, as things like Idle No More show us, Indigenous peoples are increasingly demanding not only recognition, but action.

    Who knows, though? June 21st is National Aboriginal Day up here in Canada, and I’m thinking about organizing a teach-in on the local histories of colonialism for my neighbours; maybe they will come out in droves. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  20. Yeah as someone who grew with multiple houses (2 of them being in the Outer Banks), I have no idea what the point is you are trying to make here.

    • I know your parents went to the Ivy League, but like, which school are they FROM?

      Can you speak Republican? Do your parents speak Republican at home?

      I think “networking” and nepotism is a really messed up way to get white people work. Shouldn’t the best qualified candidate get the job?

      Can I touch your wallet?

      Rich white people are just better at drinking expensive scotch than everyone else, it’s something about their genetics. What? It’s not racist if it’s a compliment!

  21. I understand that there is white privilege and there is class based privilege. I think this piece would be better suited for “racialicious” or an equivalent website? At least if this site is going to post race related issues, can there be a piece about how Asian Americans have risen to become powerhouses in very important fields over the last two decades, and they have accomplished all this despite not having white privilege, being discriminated against [including entry into upper education (i.e., latest ivy scandal)], and minimal presence in politics and media (though hopefully that will change in the near future).

    • I’m not sure what the intention of this comment is, but its tone makes me uncomfortable. This site is for queer women, and the First Person column is for individual queer women to share their stories or experiences. Ashley is a queer woman, sharing an experience from her life regarding her race and class positionality. And the desire for a piece about how “Asian Americans” have “risen to become powerhouses” despite not having certain privileges sounds uncomfortably like the suggestion that other people of color are to somehow to blame for not being “powerhouses”, rather than white supremacy. It’s especially problematic given the homogenization of an entire continent, given that there are Asian-American ethnic groups that have and do still experience severe struggles.

  22. . It is the right thing to stand up for voices missing in the room, the same voices that are easily ignored when they are present.

    This, I love this!

  23. This is an awesome article, and I’m so so happy to read it here on Autostraddle.

    Most of my anti-racism training/education has come through the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, a bad-ass multiracial collective of anti-racist folks. In their basic workshops, they approach racism by focusing initially on a class analysis, so I have learned from them first and foremost how to talk about class and then its profoundly entangled relationship to racism, and how those narratives converge and diverge. I feel like this article embodies that.

  24. I’m a WOC and have a white, low class friend who crosses that fine line between “understanding ally” and “white savior.” she’s bascially that person who can sometimes be like “woe is me, I’m white and poor, I’m SO OPPRESSED” to the extent that she tries to equate her experience to mine (the black, low class experience) and winds up trivializing mine in the process.
    I may show her this, because this is everything I’ve wanted to tell her. Thanks.

  25. Very nice piece – sorry to be coming to it so late. I’ve seen a lot of these issues play out in different ways in my own life – I’m mixed-race, and while the black side of my family hadn’t a lot of money, they had more than the white side, who were/are quite poor, and with whom I’m closer. (We were largely raised by my mother’s large Italian family.) Also, I’m fair enough that on most occasions I “pass” (without meaning to..) if not for white, then certainly for Hispanic or Middle Eastern, which is what most strangers assume me to be.

    This has played out in lots of complex and interesting ways – all kinds of overlaps. I have one cousin, on my dad’s side, with whom I’m not close, but who I run into when visiting home. He has a LOT of money now, by my standards anyway, and he’s quite – the old word was “dicty” He’s a black man in America, which certainly carries a lot of problems. He’s also – and he never does seem to recognize this – a moneyed hetero cis-male. I mean, he recognizes it alright; he throws it around. But he doesn’t seem to recognize that that carries A LOT of privilege as well…

    Anyway, thanks for the piece. Hope to see more from you.

  26. Thankyou from this white person who’s experienced both longterm poverty (disability not background), and affluence. I’ve been thinking a lot about class, and it’s opened my eyes to how many people I know just… don’t. And my olive-skinned mum might talk a lot about her dirt poor “five to a bed” background in Ireland, but unlike most of the world, her “working her arse off” got her somewhere, thanks to her ability to assimilate (came here with the White Australia Policy). Now I live in a frontier town which is divided into White professionals, up & coming Asian ex-refugees/migrants, and dirt-dirt-poor Indigenous Australians. Class? Race? How many of my white peers just do NOT want to have that conversation.

    But anyway, thank you. I need to listen more.

Comments are closed.