Diarist LSophia wrote on witnessing the operation of white privlege with a well-written and powerful story. Her diary has inspired me to try and write some observations about my own life's learning about class and race privlege.
I grew up in an upper middle class family of white academics and was blissfully unaware of the privleged status that gave me. My parents did there best to raise me to be a free-thinker and to not just blindly accept authority (unless it was their rules.) Many years later Momma said "I think we may have done that too well."
I am now 61 and living the life of a poverty stricken senior citizen, but not without realizing that I still benefit from a variety of privleges based on how most of the public see me, and not on the basis of the content of my character.
Below the break I embark on an account of my journey to this awareness.
Growing up in New York City as the child of white academics, I was protected by them and by strong race and class privleges from learning and seeing the problems that many of the folks around me were subject to in their daily lives. I could see that others were obviously not as well-off as I was, and the awareness of racial differences (based on skin color) were obvious to me as well. However, my access to news of the struggles they endured was limited, and my parents took pains to teach me that there was no scientific reason to discriminate on the basis of race or income. The de facto segregation of NYC schools meant that I generally did not deal with discriminatory conditions on a regular basis. As a young child of 5 or ao, I had Japanese friends, and also religiously diversity of other friends.
My first inklings of discrimination as a personal experience occurred as a result of religion. Momma had selected the Episcopal Church as the best choice for socialization that would not conflict too much with others, but it was still a Christian denomination, leaving us kids as Gentiles in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood (Riverdale, The Bronx.) One day in the lunch line, one of the bullies called out "Hey Goy, pass me some milk!" I was not yet aware of the full effect the word Goy implied, but I did know that I was the target and the emotional tones were clear. I got a carton of milk, opened it, and passed it to him, football style. That trip to the principal's office, with a few other incidents, led to spending the next several years of private schooling.
One summer, we travelled by car to Florida to meet my great-grandmother. In 1958, the South United States were still in the throes of segregation, and it took some insistence by Momma to convince me that I simply "could not" use the facilities labeled "Colored" while on the trip. She could not provide a good reason other than to say that that was the "rules" in that part of the country, and that it "would upset many people" if I continued to break the rules. A few hostile comments from strangers served to enforce the training, and the emotional tones in the comments reminded me greatly of the lunch line incidents. I was relieved to return to NYC, where the segregation wasn't ovious or so vehemently enforced.
In 1966, my Dad took a full professorship at Duke University, and that summer, we moved to Durham, NC and I went back to public school. I was in 7th grade, and the junior high school was segregated, but not so obviously that I really noticed. I could read whatever I wanted in class, and maintain decent grades by aceing the tests. The move to high school in 10th grade coincided with the year that integration occurred in Durham (1969.) I was not at all bothered by the appearance of black kids in class, and I seemed to be one of the few in school who got along with the blacks as well as I got along with the whites. That year I did learn about being called names, such as "Yankee" and "n__ lover." It didn't phase me as the private schools had taught me some control and self-reliance. And then I figured out I was Gay.
Coming Out to the family was amazingly easy for me. Momma, the M.D., was supportive and had figured it out before I did. Dad, the Ph.D., was mostly psycologically absent and not opposed to it (we just never talked about it.) My brothers were not opposed and it was never an issue between me and them. At school, because I knew the biological functions of sex (demonstrated aptly in biology class oral reports) and because I did not talk about sex, everyone there assumed I was actually getting sex (assumed to be heterosexual, of course) and they were jealous. Those in school whom I ran into at the bar in Chapel Hill were more afraid that I would "tell" on them than anything else; they soon learned that was not a problem.
My Senior year in High School was quite different. Over the summer, my parents funded several solo trips for me to Washington, DC. Mostly to visit the Smithsonian, but I also got to sample a wide range of the active gay nightlife there. I was used to occasional mixed drinks at home, and ordering confidently at a DC bar led to me not being carded. I discovered the gay leather culture, and discovered my fetishes for it immediately. Adopting a leather style wardrobe, however, led to my being outed in school -- mostly because a few Duke-associated guys with kids in my school could not refrain from asking their kids revealing questions about me.
That was when the shell of my privleged existence cracked. Quite a variety of relationships in my life changed rather suddenly. Some folks and groups dropped me and dis-invited my participation, and other groups and folks became less inhibited in my company. The Boys Scouts forced me out and other volunteer jobs suddenly disappeared. These changes, interestingly, actually spurred me to become politically active in the nascent LGBT right movement. This involvement, in turn, lead to some active law enforcement harassment and to an understanding of what the loss of class, sex and race privleges really meant.
I managed to scrape through my senior year of high school, again relying on passing the tests rather than on being active in class or handing in homework regularly. I placed well on the SAT, and missed only one answer on the Biology Achievement supplement. College was in reach and acceptance at any of the Reseach Triangle universities was nearly guaranteed. I selected NC State in Raleigh with a double major in Computer Science and Biology (Genetics) for two reasons. NCSU was the only school in the Triangle to offer an undergraduate Computer Science program, and Raleigh was far enough away from Durham and Chapel Hill to allow a bit of a retreat from being out.
The larger and more spaced out nature of the university campus, and the diversity of the student body in college provided emotional room to be an activist and to participate and a variety of extra-curricular activities where being gay was either a non-issue or an advantage. In addition to my required courses I did theatre, glee club and campus radio; and quite a bit of promiscuous sex. After freshman year in on-campus housing, my parents gave me a car and allowd me to live at home and commute to school. The car also allowed me to flee to DC on many weekends, and to visit Atlanta and other cities during longer breaks.
After graduating, my first professional job was as an operator for a billing computer system at the Duke Medical Center. Reels of magnetic tape were transmitted to a remote processing center, and the resulting bills and patient chart inserts were transmitted back (and recorded on magtape) then printed and distributed. A nice 2nd shift 5-day job, and still time after work to go out on the town each night. As it turned out, my boss had hired me because I was gay. (He was, but I didn't know it at the time.) He made sexual advances on me, and while they weren't exactly unwelcome, he tried to add accepting them to the requirements of my job. At aabout the same time, a vacation in NYC led to a situation where I was raped and had to visit Bellvue Hospital for some surgery. These experiences led to a great deal of self-analysis and some resolutions about being in control of my own life.
As it turned out, my boss's boss was quite high in the medical center administration (his boss was the med center chancellor) and when I met him, turned out to be someone I first met while I was still in high school (at the bar in Chapel Hill!) He would not fire or actively dsicipline my boss, but did arrange for me to transfer within the medical center to any department I wanted to choose. To bide some time and fully recover from my NYC problem, I chose to be a coder and research associate in the medical records department. I was still doing computer work with systems I knew, and my science training was very useful in ICD-9 coding of complex medical charts.
In the medical record coding division, I was the only young male in a collection of middle-aged and older women. The supervisor was nearing retirement and all the woment were encouraged to gossip among themselves about the charts they were coding to increase their knowledge of medical nuances. There were rules about not leaking patient information outside of the workplace (this was before the HIPPA laws) but some info inevitable leaked. I was, however, recognized and marked as separate and different from the other coders. I, of course, could ask questions and be asked questions about details of coding some diagnoses, and as the computer expert, I was doing almost all the database runs that doctors would submit to find cases of specific diseases for their research or for teaching. However, as the lone male in the unit, I also had to lift the boxes for paper and forms up to and down from the shelves. The stereotyped treatment of me as a male vs. their femaleness was quite obvious and a source of contention, especially if I was in the middle of something when they wanted assistance they didn't really need. It was also recognized after a while that I did not disclose any information about the records I coded outside of conversations with the supervisor or the department head. This led to my being responsible for the coding of special cases that the supervisor and department head realized their needing extra privacy. (E.g. sex changes, certain plastic and special surgeries, or rare and/or embarassing cases.) It was fascinating work, but not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Fortune smiled on me when my Dad acquired a new computer for one of his grants in Immunology Bioinformatics, and about the same time, my brother was giving up on a project in one of the Microbiology and Immunology department labs. I transferred to Microbiology and Immunology as a Systems Programmer in the labs, and actually was responsible for about four systems (all Digital Equipment PDP-11 machines) including the ones my Dad was using. I was mostly my own boss, dealing on a nearly equal basis with the researchers, able to schedule my time in relation to what system needed new updates or maintenance, and lots of spare time to interact with other departments around campus as desired. I wound up with consulting relationships with a number of other departments, and my M&I department got paid for the time I spent on other departments projects, which in turn padded my salary with most of what was paid for consulting. In the academic and medical research environment, I could dress as I wanted for working on the computers, and could wear a white lab coat over the jeans, tee-shirts and leather vest when dealing with more formal situations.
I was the late 1970's by now, and the social environment in Durham was turning darker. The police in NC were harassing various minorities, especially the gays and hispanics. Vice units were entrapping most of the anonymous sex spots, and the gay bars were losing their licences for beer and alcohol for even the most minor infractions of some really stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H draconian liquor laws. The LGBT activist groups were being infiltrated by LE snitches and provocateurs, who were intent on associating them with pedophilia. Quite a number of my friends stepped back into the closet and resumed being seen prominently with their wives and families. In early 1979 I met a woman programmer in the Department of Physiology administrative office. She was only 4'4" tall, smart as could be, and irish to boot. We hit it off pretty well as friends, and it didn't take long to discover that she was a lesbian, and she figured out pretty quick I was gay. We mutually decided that given the climate of oppression in NC at that time it would be beneficial to "date" as cover for each other in certain situations.
Was it a cop out? In some ways, yes. But we both had had experiences as LGBTQ persons that caused us to be fearfull of the situation. Besides that, we enjoyed each other's company. We shared many interests, worked near each other on campus, and I was the only man who ever visited her apartment that her dog did not try to bite. In fact, her dog was so comfortable with me that I could trim its nails that had not been cut in years. I moved in with her on Halloween 1979 and started planning for the future. Given the situation and the social upheavals of the time, we came to a conclusion that being best friends was a much better reason to marry than any consideration of sex. Besides that, we actually loved each other.
With her parents' and my parents' approval and because of some miscommunications between her estranged parents, we went to the magistrates office on January 11, 1980 and wed. Her mother and step-father arranged an impromptu reception and quite a few folks of all persuations showed up to celebrate. The reaction from a lot of the LGBTQ community, however, was very mixed. Some loudly protested the "cop out" and refused to have anything to do with us, some took it as an "arrangement" and remained casual accquaintances, and a few recognized that the B in LGBTQ would include us, and those few were dear friends. There were, as could be expected, some misunderstandings by various folks: the rector of the Episcopal Church we attended, a distant relative in the congregation who protested loudly that allowing us to marry in church would be an abomination, the mayor of Durham who thought we had gone straight, and unfortunately my mother who "cherished" Sue for "saving" her favorite son.
In 1981, budget cuts to the NIH programs caused large cuts in grant funding, and a consequential round of layoffs of "non-essential" workers in those programs. Sue and I ended up as non-essential and began job hunting. She interviewed at DEC in Colorado Springs, but it (fortunately?) fell through when they decided that they couldn't afford to hire me as well. I took a position at McDonnell-Douglas in New Jersey to be a System Administrator consultant at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ. Sue found a position as assistant supervisor of the Word Processing department fpor Nabisco Brands near Morristown. We got an apartment in Morris Plains, where she could drop me at the train station for a bus ride to Holmdel, or later, into NYC for work at NY Telephone/Bell Atlantic. This "sabbatical" on the NY Metro consulting circuit proved to me that I was not cut out for the corporate world. But at night, we could get our leather jackets on and go out to sing the new sensation of karaoke. Some nights at gay bars, some nights in NYC, and by then much of the LGBTQ activism was better prepared emotionally to deal with a functionally bi couple with energy and some spare resources. We also became activists for Black Civil Rights as Sue worked through a self examination of her experience of being at and hearing Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech. We were conciously aware of the shell of privlege that strangers would presume was ours, and we would delightedly demolish their perceptions and prejudices with impromptu speeches or street theatre techniques.
In 1984, we returned to Durham and moved in with my parents to be caregivers for them as a result of their health problems. Momma was a Breast Cancer survivor, twice, and Dad had congestive heart failure and mini-strokes (TIAs) that confused his social skills but not his mathematics. Eventually, Dad bought us a small house in Durham and we settled in to an American Dream lifestyle punctuated by speeches and workshops an d a real job at the university, working together to support Demographic Studies computing and applications development.
This is way too long by now, so I will defer the finale of this autobiography to another diary. Thank you for reading this far and I welcome reasonable questions and discussion.