This is How I Learned To Accept White Privilege As a White Person from Poverty

I was asked to write this story of my background by readers of my post on ACES privilege. That story follows below. My theory is that ACES Privilege or Adverse Childhood Experiences Privilege is a vehicle by which white students from poverty backgrounds can be helped to understand their own white privilege, something that has previously been difficult for them to acknowledge.

My college roommate when I moved in was a black woman from the south side of Chicago. I was relieved. I was attending a very white, pretty upper class, Midwestern college, but I was from the East side of Waterloo, Iowa. I was more comfortable with a poor black roommate than a white, upper class one, even though I am a white person. If you go by peers, mentors, teachers, friends, enemies, first loves, my life was very intimately influenced by race, specifically living in a black community in Iowa. Before you laugh, Waterloo has the highest percentage of African American citizens of any city in Iowa (15.5%), alongside a small Mexican population, some documented, some not (5%), and Bosnian, Muslim refugees as well as other refugees.

Here’s the thing. Waterloo is the 10th worst city for African Americans to live in within the entire United States according to recent work by Frohlich and Stebbins. Aside from the 24% unemployment rate, only 6.2% of Waterloo’s businesses are black-owned. In 2003, when the city was issuing major construction contracts, minority contractors protested the fact none of them were hired. Waterloo is also the most segregated large city in Iowa. There are six census tracks were African Americans primarily live, but there is one tract that has the highest percentage of Africans Americans living there. It it a 20 block triangle of Waterloo that has been called the Black Triangle with both pride and derision.

This is really where Waterloo’s poorest citizen’s live as well. And their situation is dire. In 1970, the unemployment rate for African Americans in Waterloo was 7.2% compared to its current 24%, and approximately the same as it is today for whites at 3.4%. Black median income is 67.7% of what white households have. The poverty rate for black children is 31% compared to 11% for white children. The rates of incarceration of blacks are sky high relative to whites. Waterloo’s unarmed-black-man-killed-by-a-white- police-officer-who-was-later-exonerated, is Derrick Ambrose, Jr., who died in 2012.

Our family lived one block from “The Black Triangle” in what was called the Fairview Cemetery census tract. Fairview Cemetery tract is also predominantly black, but there are a few white folks like our family that either lived there for political reasons in an effort to integrate the city or for economic reasons because they couldn’t afford better. We lived there for economic reasons.

From my training and work at the Center for Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health, at the University of Michigan, I learned about the complex relationship between poverty and mental illness. Some people are poor because they are mentally ill. A lot of people are mentally ill because they were poor. My parents were a little bit of both.

We were physically neglected to the point that the State of Iowa took us away from our parents and put us in foster care for a few months. We were emotionally neglected because our parents were psychologically unable to cope with parenting because of their untreated mental illnesses. As far as I know, not everyone experienced sexual abuse, but a few family members did at the hands of people outside the immediate family or by friends. We were fortunate our parents were never incarcerated and they abstained from drugs and alcohol due to their strict religious beliefs.

My parents were mentally incapable of handling unemployment once it hit. After the 1980 Farm Crisis, the symptoms of their mental illnesses seemed to be exacerbated wildly. They were unable to maintain basic needs like food and shelter.

When we were returned to my parents following foster care in 1982, we had been moved into government housing in Waterloo. It was still predominantly white housing so as not to spook the neighborhood where it has been built. But, for me, it was the first exposure I had to having black friends and enemies. I did not seek out the enemies, but it felt like race got in the way of our relationship. For example, one African American boy called me names to and from school. Finally, I hauled off and clocked him, and we got into a fight. He told the principal I called him racist names, which was not true. He did leave me alone after that.

It was not the same with other black boys. One African American boy who didn’t live in the government housing, but who came to visit was the first male to compliment me in a romantic way. He became the first boy I kissed. I received some ridicule in school for having a black boyfriend, but Michael Jackson and Prince had made a lot of white teenage girls develop crushes. It was less out of the realm of possibility for an interracial relationship to develop.

After a failed inspection by the government housing managers, my mother announced we were moving. The only place we could afford was pretty rundown. You find rundown, low-rent housing in the African American segregated housing in the city, so that’s where we moved.

While growing up in this community, there was a lot of misery in our family’s life. My brother was hit by a car, went into a coma, and when he eventually recovered, he was never the same. He eventually committed suicide. Our father and mother decided to finally end the years of domestic violence, and divorce. It is harder to say whether it was better to have him around or not. In the end, probably not.

My mother repeatedly attempted suicide, abdicated all of her parental responsibilities to me, and went through bouts of abusive behavior pulling hair, swinging belts or fly swatters, and screaming her doubts of her children’s love. Her inability to secure employment or to keep up with the paperwork required by social services meant our income was unsteady, and always very low. It boggled my mind that the welfare check was only a few dollars higher than the rent bill. It meant we had to hustle money to pay everything else.

We managed to get cash in exchange for food stamps through a system of buying items that cost just over a dollar, then getting back 99 cents in change from two single food stamps worth $2. This was terrible in the long term, because food stamps lasted about a week. Food was then sought out at churches, charitable organizations, and food banks. We were constantly running up against our food bank limit, too. Then, you just hoped it was the school year, because school lunch was the best part of the day, because…food.

Meanwhile, there was even a brief period of time when my racial identity blurred a bit, which gave me the tiniest bit of sympathy for Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who was living as a black woman. I was hanging around African American people all of time. When I attended the Boys/Girls Club dances, I was the only white person or one of a few in what had to be a gymnasium full of 250 other teens. I took on speech affectations. My first break-up, my first pregnancy scare, and my first rape were all with black teens. I would also be raped by a white boy, because misogyny was rampant in our neighborhood, so I had no racist notions of sexual assault as a teen. Now, I know there is a long history of trouble between white women and black men.

When I was 14, my boyfriend and I were in Cedar Falls “cruising” which almost all there was to do in our city. All this meant was that we were driving around the cities. We were pulled over by a white police officer. He proceeded to harass my boyfriend by suggesting that he did not belong in Cedar Falls, but instead in Black Triangle. He implied he was a drug dealer and illegally searched the car. I was furious, so I wanted to lose my temper with the officer. Start yelling. Mouthing off. Something. Ben implored me to keep silent, and his urgency convinced me to do so. I did not realize at the time the danger he was in.

I had a knife pulled on me when I got off the school bus. That turned out all right, because her quarrel was with my best friend. I didn’t get so lucky the next time someone jumped me at the bus stop though. She had 20 pounds on me at least and her fists could fly. I stopped dating African American boys so that I would not have any cause to be in a fight with another African American girl, and the plan mostly worked. I wasn’t forming any new enemies in the neighborhood. Girls were tough where I lived. One of my best friends had been in a fight, and almost half of her breast had been bitten off. The scar was enormous. She protected me. I had a few people who protected me, because I wasn’t a fighter.

A stout, African American woman who always kept her hair in an Afro-puff ponytail, rescued me from poverty. My best friend went away for the summer with a college opportunity program called Upward Bound (a TRIO program). I didn’t want to be left alone, so I joined up. Ironically, this federal program for low-income students is why I was at an upper class, white college. The woman who directed the program played and plays an overarching role in my academic success, which underpins all of my other life improvements. When I think about how Phyllis was a mother to me, I think about how saying that could sound like saying she played the role of a mammy. I ask others to believe me in saying she played the role of an guardian angel to children who didn’t have parenting in the first place.

I almost didn’t finish college. I didn’t fit in socially. I was working full time off campus and part time on campus so I was exhausted. My family needed me at home for economic and functional purposes. The curriculum kept saying nasty things about poor people. I made it through because of the interventions of TRIO programs. This made graduate school even more foreign with a rarefied group of people who were highly educated and highly resourced. I resented having these individuals preach to me about accepting my white privilege.

From my perspective, I didn’t feel any privilege. It had been an exhausting life up until then. I had experienced eight of the standard ACES with school violence and neighborhood violence as additional categories if people allow them. No one was acknowledging that I had nothing in common with the other white people there. I didn’t even fit in with the working class white students who wanted to talk about social class.

It was after another student said to me, “None of your adversity is discounted. You just have to think about your friends. They had your adversity plus discrimination and racism.”

That’s a no-brainer. Of course, they did. However, it took someone telling me the first part, that my adversity was not denied, to easily adopt the second part — I have white privilege. I had witnessed racism and discrimination throughout my youth growing up in a black community, so I should have been an easy lock to get this concept. However, it was because I grew up there I was struggling to get with the program. The simple acknowledgement of what I describe as ACES or Adverse Childhood Experiences privilege stood in the way of accepting white privilege for me. Once it was quickly done and over with, I faced white privilege with full awareness and acceptance of what white supremacy is doing and how I benefit from it.

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