My very white story of privileged survival and opportunities to rebound from challenging circumstances while white:

I grew up in a 100% white midwestern town of 3,900 people. My parents married the day after my mom’s 16th bday. My dad was 21. I’m not sure why they married.(1/25)

She dropped out of high school. Dad had graduated HS & by all accounts was working shady jobs for shady people, which included known organized crime associates. Drugs and gambling were very much the context of their life & his work. I was not planned & was born 3 weeks (2/25)

before my mother turned 18. She and my dad were splitting up as both had recently had affairs and were partying constantly. They divorced when I was a few mos old. My parents were drug users, did not have steady employment, no education, & both came out of abusive homes. (3/25)

I lived w/my mom for most of my 1st yr, I think (the details are unclear w/varying narratives), but she had left me (I think at my paternal grandparents, but that’s also unclear) by the time I was 13 mos old at the absolute latest. She was partying heavily and reeling from (4/25)

the sudden death of her mother, which was followed quickly by her father marrying a girl only a couple years older than my mother(). She stayed in town for ~a year although she has said she rarely saw me. I bounced around places and the memories I have are all me (5/25)

alone at my grandparents, waiting for my dad, or at very adult parties. Suffice to say, it was not a healthy environment for a child. My mom joined the army to clean herself up when I was 2ish, so she left and I don’t have any memories of her until she returned remarried (6/25)

and pregnant when I was 6. My preschool years include a lot of memories of people doing lines of cocaine, drinking Michelob Light foam off the top of my dad’s beer, & knowing where the pot was kept—among other things. I also remember being in the floorboard of the car when (7/25)

the police pulled him over for shooting a deer in a refuge late at night—w/a 3 year old along for the ride. I remember going to court for a different arrest & sitting on his girlfriend’s lap as the exhibit of why he shouldn’t go to jail. My dad and eventual stepmom cleaned (8/25)

up & scaled the partying out (although dad still made bongs out of pvc pipe). My dad got a job at the post office & they had 2 kids. But it was still quite dysfunctional & despite some positives, I was a poor kid in an uneducated family w/drug use, abuse, & mental illness. (9/25)

I was ALWAYS worried about my dad getting arrested & going to jail (leaving me nowhere to go), including one night when I was 12 & he left w/a gun to go after my crazy, violent uncle who had tried to kill my grandma.

I never once worried he would be killed by the police. (10/25)

Fast forward about 20 years and my little brother (dad+stepmom, 13 yrs younger than me) was a confused, scared young boy whose parents were going through a nasty divorce. His mom had lost her job for stealing prescription medicine & our dad was spiraling mentally. My (11/ 25)

brother began to act out in school. I believe he brought a pellet gun to school one day and shot it, which got him expelled & sent to a sort of reform program. He began to use drugs. Our sister, his full sister 3 yrs older than him, got pregnant as a teen and moved out. (12/25)

I was long gone by that time and he was left alone in the mess of everyone’s poor choices, which served to escalate his own. Over a ~10 year period he had more than 40 criminal charges, including many felonies. Most drug related, but also thefts. He failed probation (13/25)

multiple times and had serious felony charges brought that resulted in appropriate punishment.

But here’s the thing, he is a sweet kid. I was always afraid of getting a call that he had overdosed (as two uncles did), but thankfully his most serious arrests led to a (14/25)

rehab that clicked (after several hadn’t). He’s now pushing a counseling degree and working as a peer counselor at the rehab. He hasn’t had an arrest in a few years and has been clean for at least a year.

This is a hard thread to write because there is deep brokenness (15/25)

in my biological family. And I don’t talk about it. I don’t want my identity to be the girl born amidst drugs, or the one w/a teen mom who dropped out of school & left her, or the sister of a recovering meth addict, or even just as a girl who grew up living check to (16/25)

check and being jealous of kids who had boring parents. Despite what my more recent public mess may lead people to conclude, I don’t like to broadcast ways in which I could be measured as inferior. But statistically, I had a lot stacked against (17/25)

me. If you’re familiar with trauma and know of the ACE test, my score is 9, which basically means I would be expected to be in a dump somewhere with a load of kids from diff men, strung out on drugs, and either being the abuser or being abused. I have always known it is (18/25)

an INCREDIBLE grace of God that I am not. Even as a white girl, these dynamics from my family history made it far more likely than not that I would struggle with drugs or teen pregnancy or education. I’ve always known to be grateful that I avoided those traps. BUT . . .

(19/25)

it wasn’t until ~2016 and listening to @LatashaMorrison, @dorenawill, @ThabitiAnyabwil, @trillianewbell, and others talk about racism, and more specifically white privilege, that I have begun to see more & more how unlikely it is that every family member I’ve mentioned in(20/25)

this thread would be alive or where we are if we hadn’t been white. The court records are online where I’m from, so I often check them for new cases. I counted today & there are more than 70 criminal charges w/my immediate bio family over the years—incl. resisting arrest (21/25)

but they all not only lived through it, they got sentences allowing for court funded rehab or other social services. Through another deal everyone even got VA benefits.

I’m proud of my sister who went from teen mom to R.N. and is a great mom. I’m proud of my brother who (22/25)

has worked HARD to turn his life around. And while I don’t have a relationship w/her, I know it’s amazing that my mother went on to raise two great kids, serve the community where they live in a multitude of ways, & is now a grandma who’s been married for ~40 years. (23/25)

But I’m learning I can’t just marvel at the craziness from which I came, the odds overcame, or the recoveries some have made. I need to learn how to appreciate the weight AND RESPONSIBILITY of knowing that if we had been black, the system that gave us all so many chances (24/25)

would have instead been closed doors at best—and quite possibly a foot on the neck or a bullet in the back in instances that mirror the news.

This is what I know. I’m still learning what to do w/it, but acknowledging it is part.

I’m a privileged girl from a privileged family.

And that is not how it should be.