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Thinking I Was Privileged Hurt Worse than Knowing I Was Poor

Writer's picture: Mekiya OutiniMekiya Outini

New Shoes | Original image by Arwan Sutanto, Courtesy of Unsplash
The Privileged's New Shoes | Original image by Arwan Sutanto, Courtesy of Unsplash

There’s no dignity in poverty, but there’s dignity in having overcome it, a subtle shade of hard-won confidence that those born to wealth and privilege will never know. I wasn’t born to wealth or privilege, not in any meaningful sense of those words, but being white and straight and male, I was conditioned to believe I was.

 

Growing up, I never felt particularly poor, mostly because I had few opportunities to interact with peers and learn what “poor” was, but here are some things that I know:

 

When I was a toddler, maybe two years old, a homeless woman approached me and my mother in a public park and offered to give us her shoes. Apparently, we looked like we needed them more than she did.

 

Around the same time, the small, red wagon that my parents used to cart me and our clothing to and from the laundromat was stolen from our yard. This amounted to no small inconvenience since it was the only vehicle we owned.

 

I’ve long suspected, and a relative has recently confirmed, that my parents spent most of my childhood in debt, relying on welfare, my grandmother’s largesse, and occasional clerical errors at the power company to keep the lights on.

 

In 2021, the first and only time he met Itto, my father proudly boasted that his mother was going to leave me a sum of such magnitude that I would never have to work again. That sum later turned out to be $30,000, one hundred percent of which has since ended up in the hands of a nursing home.

 

With time, indicators of my family’s dire socioeconomic situation faded, giving way to telltale signs that we might actually be middle-class. True, we never took expensive vacations abroad, but every summer, we visited Folly Beach and stayed in big rentals overlooking the sea. True, I had no trust fund, but I never worried about where my next meal was coming from, either—and, indeed, they sometimes came from white-tablecloth restaurants. True, my parents never could’ve covered my college tuition, but it was taken for granted, when I set my sights on college, that these expenses would be paid by grants, scholarships, and loans—which, indeed, they were.

 

Tellingly, when the Biden-Harris administration announced their plans to waive $175 billion in student debt in 2022, my father announced that he’d known something like this would happen all along.

 

Standing in front of the mirror as a young man, I did not—could not—see what lay beneath the surface of me: the subtle influence of half-forgotten stories; the way my thoughts and feelings flowed through courses worn by unacknowledged circumstances. Not even if I squinted. Instead, I saw what everybody else saw: the child of a two-parent household, articulate and educated, white and straight and male.

 

No political movement is to blame for the self-hatred that seeped steadily into the bedrock of my being. My angst had more to do with my father’s mood swings, my mother’s self-effacing puerility, the substance abuse and mental illness that run on both sides of my family, long-term isolation, and my parents’ relentless denial that anything whatsoever might be wrong than with the peddlers of buzzwords like “BIPOC” and “decolonize.” That said, my self-loathing never would've become as acute as it did if I had not been told repeatedly, from without and from within, that I enjoyed every advantage, that I had earned nothing, that anything I had achieved or might achieve amounted, ultimately, to the downstream effects of my ancestors’ pillage and plunder—that, in short, I was up to my ears in luxuries that I did not deserve.

 

For twelve years, I didn't get a full night’s sleep. Night after night, I lay awake in my twin bed, tormented, paralyzed, inflamed, nerves alight with white noise, every cell tuned to a dissonant frequency, replaying each transgression I’d committed, or might have committed, or might have been perceived as having committed, deliberate, accidental, of commission or omission, alleged, proved, and purely hypothetical. When others transgressed, I went out of my way to excuse them. They were, after all, victims. My victims. Toward myself, meanwhile, I grew very cold.

 

This is what privilege means.

 

Even if I had money, this would’ve been true. If I had money, it might have been worse. If I had money, I might never have let myself question what I knew to be true.

 

Today, the fact that I was admitted into a prestigious MFA program no longer means to me what it once meant: that some other person, more deserving, had not been admitted. The fact that my department offered me a merit-based award, raising my annual teaching stipend from $12,000 to $15,000, no longer means that someone, somewhere, must’ve committed a clerical error. The fact that I was allowed to graduate in good standing no longer means that the world is corrupt, debased, unfair. There was a time, however, when these were articles of faith for me, realities which many in my circle reinforced, and few critiqued or questioned.

 

For what it’s worth, I am a straight, white, college-educated male from a two-parent household. Of these five descriptors, I am proud of only one: my education. The other four, I did not work for, earn, or choose.

 

Sometimes, these arbitrary factors work to my advantage, commanding deference and respect—though, having experienced self-hatred firsthand, I can attest that they’ll never outweigh the handicap imposed by self-sabotage. Other times, they work against me, inspiring resentment and envy. In neither case can I take any of these responses seriously.

 

Whether fawning or frothing, these reactions all exhibit a comically absolute misapprehension of what truly matters: not whether you’re white, or straight, or male, but what whiteness, straightness, and maleness happen to mean in the context you find yourself navigating; not whether your parents are alive and married to each other, but how they relate to each other, to you, and to themselves; not what you are, but who and how you choose to be; not what cards you’re dealt in life, but how you play them.

 

The revelation that my annual salary of $15,000 and my hypothetical inheritance of $30,000 together came to something less than the titanic windfall that I, a member of the White Race, was allegedly on track to receive did introduce certain logistical anxieties into my life, but frankly, these paled in comparison to the moral and ethical angst that they helped me resolve.

 

There is no dignity in poverty. Anyone who tells you otherwise is parroting the same romantic myth that led my parents, also white and straight and college-educated, to throw their lives away, drinking, smoking weed, and working dead-end jobs into their sixties, then collapsing, but unless one was the architect of one’s own hardship, then that hardship also must contain a seed: the latent opportunity to work one’s way out of it.

 

This is the real privilege—not whiteness, not straightness, not maleness, and not money, even, but the knowledge that you’ve been given nothing, inherited nothing, and stolen nothing: that what you've earned is what you have, and what you have, you've earned.



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