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Anyway, one last Keillor thought: he based a lot of his latest thought-burp on the old chestnut of "white privilege can't apply to ME because I, though white, grew up poor." And I have a direct, lived-experience response to that.
I'm also white and grew up extremely poor and rural. Like really, really poor; eating-pizza-sauce-from-a-jar-because-it's-the-only-food-in-the-house poor.
But I got lucky in that I happened to take standardized tests well, and was able to go to undergrad, where I a) got a credential that opened up middle-class jobs and b) very painfully learned the (extremely different) social mores of the (white) middle class
and that's where the white privilege kicks in: once I learned how to operate in that different space, I was able to just inhabit it without any asterisks or obvious markers that I came from somewhere else. It doesn't work that way if you're not white.
I guess I'll take Keillor's word for it that he grew up disadvantaged. And he figured out how to move up into the white middle-class space. And somehow, despite wanting to be known as a thinker, he can't see that this path isn't open to everybody.
