Many Varieties of Privilege

Let me preface this post by saying I fully believe in white privilege.  I fully believe in the oppression of many groups based upon race, upon class, upon gender, upon sexual orientation.  These are evils that should be eradicated from our society.  Anyone who knows me knows I feel this way.  

However, I have had recent conversations in which people do not believe that non-stereotypical groups can be oppressed or un-privileged.  So I want to share a little bit of my personal history.  

I was raised in a white, middle class family. I was homeschooled. When I was fourteen, my dad was laid-off from his job. The job he took did not pay what his previous job had paid, so my mom, sister, and I started a cleaning service. We cleaned people's houses, businesses, rentals, and repossessions. We cleaned the repossessed houses to catch up back house payments so we did not lose the house we lived in.

I remember running across roaches. I remember the dead bat in the living room of one apartment we cleaned. That was the one where our feet stuck to the kitchen floor when we walked across it because of the grease and dirt. I remember one business we cleaned twice a week where the men who worked would put dead mice under the desks - just to be funny. That one was also full of cigarette smoke and whisky bottles. It was not fun for someone like me who was allergic to smoke. The money that we made went to pay bills. Since I was only fourteen, we told people I was almost sixteen, because in Kansas, someone can legally drop out of school at sixteen. (Those were also the years we had popcorn for Thanksgiving dinner one year. The next year, we had boxed macaroni and cheese).

We also started delivering Buyer's Guide routes. For those that do not live in Salina, the Buyer's Guide was a weekly newspaper. We took eight routes - of approximately 200-300 papers per route. We also delivered substitutes on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Then the Buyer's Guide at that time also had magazines routes (Seventeen, Woman's Day, Golf, Popular Mechanics, among others. Also a magazine called The Country Connection published by a radio station. It was the first magazine I ever wrote for). We delivered I don't remember how many magazine routes in Salina, plus the whole town of Abilene, Kansas. I kept my share of that money. That was my pay for cleaning houses and delivering.

In those years (there were several), the only days I had off from both work and school work was Christmas. No other days. From fourteen years old on. In fact, I graduated from high school in September. My diploma shows a September graduation date. I was supposed to graduate in May, but I had gotten behind with everything else going on. I can honestly say if I had not been homeschooled, there is no way I would have graduated from high school.

Privilege takes many forms. Sometimes those who seem to be privileged are not. They just are willing to make sacrifices. I fully believe privilege and oppression exist. Especially in our Americanized culture. However, we cannot allow stereotypes to dictate who is privileged and who is not.