White Privilege and the New Fairy Tale

The (temporary) grief of waking up

I’ve been going through the garage lately. Apparently, it is full of white privilege. I feel funny about even trying to give that sh*t away.

I mean, giving away white privilege feels like, well, like white privilege….

I tried, first, to give it to my sons. Formal dining room furniture? No thanks. Grandma’s china? Nope. One of the 40 sets of napkin ring holders (giraffes, maple leaves, French butlers!) my mother-in-law collected? Um, no. Okay, I get it. After all, who wants the detritus of an immoderate era gone by? But the books? Surely, they would want the books they loved.

When my kids told me to toss the box of Harry Potter books, I was stunned. I questioned them, thrice.

Really??? You loved these books. They were, like, the theme/meme of your childhood. You couldn’t wait for each new book to come out. We went to the midnight viewing of the movies (at least twice!!) on opening night. Do you remember how we were on vacation in England when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out and we scoured the countryside to find a bookstore that had it available? Remember how it had a different cover than the American version and you thought that was so cool? You want to just give them away now?

My oldest son, Bryce, read The Order of the Phoenix in one day. One day. It’s a big book (longest of the series at 766 pages — UK version). His owl-eyes missed all the British sight-seeing that day, lost deep in his Hogwarts world. He used to love me telling the story of how, once on a city street, I overheard a little girl ask her parents, “Is that Harry Potter?” as we passed them. I turned to see her looking wide-eyed over her shoulder at my round-glasses son.

Now, those once-precious books are just rubbish, an embarrassing ode to white privilege, and maybe even transphobia, as we no longer judge a book only by its cover, but also by its author’s tweets. And so, out they go, along with all the other evidence of plenty, monogamy, and tradition — the furniture and dishes and linens and trinkets. Even the photo albums of the annual summer vacations — eating escargot in France, sun-bathing in Mexico, rafting the Grand Canyon. So much privilege. It’s quaint. A little embarrassing. And so yesterday.

I find myself grieving this loss of fantasy and enchantment and magic possibility, both theirs and my own. As a child, I loved to read books about people traveling to exotic locales (Out of Africa, West With The Night, Gulliver’s Travels) and tales of girls who had fallen on hard times being chosen, for their wit and beauty, by the duke/baron/local lord as the love of his life (ah, Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer).

I had no idea that my fantasies were examples of white privilege and that whole races and social groups were excluded from these storied opportunities. I didn’t see the brown hands and smudged faces working in the back kitchens of the fancy homes and ships of my dreams.

Truth be told, I was simply trying to escape my own drudgery.

For years, I was embarrassed about the poverty of my childhood. When others reminisced about a family ski trip or childhood vacation, I would keep quiet. EVEN MY CHILDREN DIDN’T KNOW MY DIRTY SECRETS.

You see, my dad scrapped, literally, to keep us fed. He was one of the original recyclers. At the age of 12, I started working at his “recycling center” after school and weekends, with my job being to pound glass in an oil barrel with a mallet. I would don eye protection and swing the mallet, as hard as my skinny Little Princess arms could swing, shattering brown bottles of Bud, as moldy clumps of sour beer flew everywhere, including, sometimes, my face and hair. When my arm finally went limp, my brother, Carl, and I would go into the shabby little trailer and try to dry ourselves and warm our hands around the little space heater, enough to go out and do another battering round, often in the cold northwest rain. Sometimes, Carl would catch me about to sob, and he would cut desperation off by giving me a ride on the forklift.

Perhaps the reason I never cared for Oliver Twist is that it was too close to home. I had no desire to remember my Dickensian childhood. I wanted to read about beautiful women in fancy gowns, being swept up into fine carriages, or carried across foreign seas. White privilege or not, I loved and longed for the magic of those romantic stories.

Indeed, it was reading happy-ending tales that propelled me out of my childhood of poverty, showing me another possibility in the grim world I inhabited. I worked hard after school and weekends, saving every penny, and shoplifting clothing to survive (not that I recommend this method!) By high school, I was working full time so that I could pay for my own college.

Yet now, even my rags-to-riches personal story feels tarnished. Did I pull myself out of Mudfog with the unfair advantage of being white? To be honest, it didn’t feel like much of an advantage (yet, I know just being white saved me from so much grief I don’t even know about— for example, hitchhiking home from work late at night — maybe things would have ended worse for me….) I did have the gender card against me as well. Having been raised with the admonition that “a woman’s place is at home taking care of her husband and children,” my plan to go to college (the only one of 12 children to do so) and to have a career was, in itself, revolutionary.

And yet, so what? With today’s gaunt refugees, and hotly uninhabitable lands, and children who don’t know if they are a boy or a girl, the cherished dreams of a poor white girl in the 1970’s, or her wide-eyed sons in the 1990’s, seem somewhat irrelevant.

So, I stand in my garage, trying to figure out how to give this sh*t away. I grieve, just a bit, as I go through each of the boxes of things that I, or my children, once loved. The trophies, the vacation mementoes, the boy scout books. My sons — one in a polyamorous marriage living in a communal house; one in a traditional marriage and career; one living in a van creating a business out of his graduate mycology degree — all say “get rid of ‘em.”

Some of the things (old wedding photos and prom programs, for example) I will burn, ceremonially, on the last day of this year. Others, I will give away and hope someone else can use them. The china, I’m convinced, will find its best use in a Greek dance extravaganza.

And with the burning and breaking and boxing, I let go of all that stuff that never really mattered — that cinderella dream of finery and fanciness. I detach from things as my sons so wisely role-model for me, and I embrace the new world, a world where love and inclusivity are the only currency that matters.

For, the fairy tale, as it turns out, is not dead. It has just been rewritten to include all of humanity. It will, I think, work better that way, for everyone.

“The End” (or is it the beginning?)

*Anyone who has detritus from the old world to burn ceremonially, join in, wherever you are, at 6 pm Pacific time. We’re gonna let that sh*t go!