Many years ago, when I first began teaching writing, I had the opportunity to design an introductory writing (essay) course, in which we read and discussed theory and criticism as well as original creative works. I thought for a long time about what I might do. I had done similar courses in the past,with safe topics like good and evil as seen through technological advances,that kind of thing. I wanted to branch out and give my students–mostly upper-class kids–something that they might not get in regards to the rest of their educations in class differences and isms of all kinds. I called it White Trash Literature.

Having come to Boston for grad school, light years away from  the small rural community in Appalachian Pennsylvania that I grew up and went to college in, I suffered more than a bit of culture shock. I sat in my first grad workshop with a ballcap on that I'd stolen from my brother-in-law. The cap said 'Redneck Express Trucking.' I had on a flannel shirt over a pocket t-shirt, old jeans, and some high-top sneakers, a look coming into style then courtesy of the grunge movement located in Seattle. I was sort of hip, until people found out I'd been dressing that way my entire life. Then I became strange, or felt that way, anyway. The point being, I lived the life we discussed in class.

In hindsight, I probably should have prepared better and read more before teaching this, but I was 22 years old and determined to find my place in this new world, if indeed I had a place at all. I developed a syllabus, found texts that covered a lot of ground, and gamely went in to teach, jumping in with all my literary limbs flying, in that wind that can blow you down Tremont Street in Boston if you're not careful. The first day, I began pointing out signs of classism: TV, movies, literature, life, Jeff Foxworthy, etc. Once we'd covered a whiteboard with material, I set them at work writing about what they knew regarding people called rednecks or white trash or hillbilly. I anticipated papers full of cogent sets of examples and a great discussion forthcoming. Then a comment came, the next day, within the first five minutes of class, and froze me up.

"Why are we studying this stuff ? These people aren't an important part of history or literature."

I wish I could say I responded well, but I didn't. Someone mercifully pulled me back into the discussion by calling the commenter in question a fucking idiot, at which the class laughed a bit, uncomfortably, which gave enough time to pull myself together and toss the question out for discussion. I hadn't expected someone to challenge the course so boldly the first day. Every day after that I went in loaded for bear, swearing I would never be so caught dry and ham-fisted again. One of the big reasons I survived teaching that class was Dorothy Allison's baldly autobiographical fiction, and the equally eye-opening essays I found along the way looking for secondary sources.

After reading her, I knew it wasn't just me, though I certainly felt like I was the only quasi-redneck in this school most of the time. What mattered was that overwhelming sense of otherness you can only get in rooms full of white people, supposed peers, with whom you have little or nothing at all in common. The following essay (Allison's) is worth reading not just because she describes what I and others who travelled from the lower middle class to the halls and classrooms of academia go through practically, but also what it's like mentally. It's a lot more than 'which fork to use for what,' though I had that problem too. Read it and see what you think.

The first time I heard, "They're different than us, don't value human life the way we do," I was in high school in Central Florida. The man speaking was an army recruiter talking to a bunch of boys, telling them what the army was really like, what they could expect overseas. A cold angry feeling swept over me. I had heard the word they pronounced in that same callous tone before. They, those people over there, those people who are not us, they die so easily, kill each other so casually. They are different. We, I thought. Me.

When I was six or eight back in Greenville, South Carolina, I had heard that same matter-of-fact tone of dismissal applied to me. "Don't you play with her. I don't want you talking to them." Me and my family, we had always been they. 'Who am I? I wondered, listening to that recruiter. 'Who are my people? We die so easily, disappear so completely—we/they, the poor and the queer. I pressed my bony white trash fists to my stubborn lesbian mouth. The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed it, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

 My people were not remarkable. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they everyone talks about—the un-grateful poor. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I loved, and having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself. I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who are destroyed or dismissed to make the "real" people, the important people, feel safer. By the time I understood that I was queer, that habit of hiding was deeply set in me, so deeply that it was not a choice but an instinct. Hide, hide to survive, I thought, knowing that if I told the truth about my life, my family, my sexual desire, my history, I would move over into that unknown territory, the land of they, would never have the chance to name my own life, to understand it or claim it.

Jennifer Kesler has some good points in this post from the blog Blind Privilege (see below for her comments indented after mine), and the comment stream is worth reading as well. I don't necessarily believe everything she believes, but a lot of it rang true for me. I grew up knowing black people from TV, but nowhere else. When I was eleven or so, my great-aunt died and I found out I had cousins who were of mixed race. That was the first I'd heard of it: no one had ever mentioned it before. So my mother and I (my father worked, of course) rode from Elmira NY to Albany NY by bus for the funeral, and even now I remember it not being much fun. It was all stress all the time when we got there, as family secrets got blown up and out of proportion and I skated around my just-told-about cousins' race as I knew I ought to, but my grandfather didn't. That's all I'll say about that.

Then my cousin David asked if he could take me around the city. My mother hesitated–she had been the one keeping the secret from me, after all–and then said yes. I'd like to say I wasn't nervous, but I was. I remember struggling with what I knew was the right thing to do–I wasn't a Boy Scout for nothing–but stopped worrying when I found out David and I read the same authors of what were then called 'men's fiction:' Mack Bolan, Eric Van Lustbader, some others. We also shared the same passion for martial arts movies. We got into his car and drove around, where I was introduced to and talked with his friends, and he bought me pop and a candy bar. We came back. End of story.

The next black person I met was in high school, several years later.

One other relevant bit from my life. I noticed no class distinctions when I was younger. I knew we didn't have much money, but I was almost proud of that, not envious of other kids who seemed to have more. We made it through life, the way other people around us did. My dad worked construction six or seven months every year for 60+ hours a week, then relaxed for the winter, able to live, albeit not terribly well, on unemployment compensation during the winter. We had a big-ass garden, my brother and father kept us in venison during the season and the winter, and often Dad would help butcher cows in exchange for some of the meat. During this trip my mother and I took to Albany, though, we were in a tough stretch. Dad didn't get called back to work for two years or so, and everything seemed tight. He and my mother picked apples, he picked up mechanic's work when he could, he even ended up doing these odd jobs for neighbors, jobs that usually fell to me or my brother. I remember distinctly, when prodded to join the conversation, that I said to my newly-met cousin Roy: "Do you know my entire outfit cost a dollar at the Salvation Army?" Roy laughed uncertainly. My grandparents, already drunk, laughed. My mother reddened up, and after a bit, I figured out I had said something I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have mentioned it because it was clear as we sat in their big house in the city drinking from fancy china cups, that the way we lived was different.

This is the last bit of personal stuff. This past year my 20-year high school reunion came up. With a newborn and an ill wife, I knew I wouldn't make it, but via Facebook and other means I reconnected with some old classmates, one of whom I spoke with on the phone, and after the usual exchanges–kids job family–I mentioned the subject matter of my writing–rural, Appalachian, somewhat depressing–and he listened, fairly interested, I guess, until I mentioned my just-post-college discovery that some of the scholarship money I used to get through my undergrad career was money designated for "poor kids from the area." "I didn't know my family were part of a rural poor demographic like that," I said. He said,"that's because nobody had any money where we grew up." I cogitated on that for days after I got off the phone, and that's where my fascination begins. There's no end in sight.

"If you blog about white privilege, you’re probably sick to death of people playing the “white trash” card in your comments. Their argument usually goes something like this:

• “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
• “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
• And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”

I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.

Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat

One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday — the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.

I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”)."

That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket

My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them
(i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting."