Discovering my own white male privilege; an ongoing journey.
I grew up in a small Midwestern community of about 4000 people. It was a farming community on the Illinois river, much like many of the other slightly larger and slightly smaller town in the surrounding area. The people in my, and most other communities of its size, were white and Protestant. There was a small Roman Catholic community and some people attended an Episcopal church that, except for lacking a Pope, seem to be a pretty good replica of the Catholic Church as I knew it. During the time I grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s I can't recall knowing anybody who would pass for a person of color living in my town or any of the other nearby towns of the same size as mine. I knew, by word-of-mouth from various sources, that "nigroes" were not allowed in my town after dark. I never knew why, but, by implication, it appeared that they were to be distrusted for some reason. Never feared exactly, buy not welcome. I never had any opportunity to interact with people who were culturally or ethnically different from me until I went off to college.
I was born the year before the United States entered World War II. My parents had experienced the Great Depression, although the effects of the Depression were not nearly as devastating in the Midwest as they were on the east and west coasts of the country. My parents were among those who actually finished high school and my mother spent two years at a Normal School preparing to be a school teacher. She taught for a while in my hometown and she would often be greeted by her former students by her maiden name ("Miss H....") when we shopped in the small downtown stores. She stopped teaching after marrying my father. Her parents, aunts and uncles were either homesteaders or the children of first-generation homesteaders. My mother's father died when she was nine years old, leaving a wife and three daughters behind. My father's father wasn't able to attend school as all, so grew up illiterate, although he could "cipher" some. Most of the people in the community came from German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrant farming families, although there was a strong representation of English names and a smattering of Italians. The people were hard working, reasonably pious and mostly welcoming of people who looked and acted like them. They wanted their kids to be well educated and they supported good local schools. The did not want people of color to live among them.
I came from a lower middle-class family, economically. We rented our house rather than owning it. We had no car. My mother (who was divorced by my father when I was eight years old) worked at low-paying jobs as a cook in restaurants. There was no money for things like music lessons or instruments, no summer camp and no such things as family vacations, and that was true for most of the kids in my neighborhood. What made me different from some of the kids was that my mother had attended college. That gave me a kind of stature in the community that most other kids in the community didn't have and also probably made me more mindful of needing to mind my own behavior around town. I was also white, male, blond/brown headed, tall and not too ugly. It took me over 40 years to understand just how privileged those characteristics made me. As a a teenager I was only aware of being poor and unable to have things that other kids my age had that I didn't have. Fortunately I was good at academics and that allowed opportunities that I would not have had otherwise.
I was lucky that the state where I lived began a statewide "merit" scholarship competition the year I was to graduate and that I was able to win one of the scholarships to use to attend any university in the state. Although feeling more than a little intimidated, I left to attend a small, private non-sectarian university about 50 miles from my hometown. I think it was there, among people I met from across the country and from some foreign countries, that I found that I could begin to explore my curiosities about people of other races and cultures. At first I was self-conscious about meeting these new people in my life. I didn't know what to expect or what would be expected of me. I was afraid that I would be found lacking somehow. What I eventually learned was that my fears about being rejected were my own projections and that the reality was that many of these new people I began to know had experienced real rejection because of the way they looked, talked or believed. The first black male I ever met and got to know was a mystery to me because he was not only black but was also gay. As I got to know him I realized that his desires and concerns were pretty much like my own (to feel secure, to be loved, to have a chance to succeed and to be able to live the lifestyle he desired), and also realized that he was having a more difficult time than I was because of the way he was perceived in both the white and black communities. I also saw the turmoil around me in the community where the university was located when there were attempts to integrate a local barber shop and to open up real estate sales to blacks in traditionally white neighborhoods. I saw things happening to people of color but not to me. I never had reason to consider how my own white privilege kept me from having to deal with those indignities, but I always felt that it was unfair for black people to be treated the ways they were for no obvious reasons other then the color of their skin. In my own life I continued to take advantage of the opportunities that came my way, feeling that, in some way, they came to be solely because I had earned them entirely on my own rather than that I was "free, white, (male) and 21" and therefore had access to opportunities that those who were not male, or white, or blond/brown haired, or tall, or not too ugly might never have. And those who were offering these opportunities looked a lot like me.