I grew up in a different world than most of my peers.
From the ages of 11-adulthood, I lived on the border of Warren, Michigan and Detroit, Michigan. 9-mile and Van Dyke to be exact. A block from where 8-Mile (the movie, if any of you remember it) was filmed and a block from where the infamous 8 mile border was created to raise property values by separating the communities of color from the non-communities of color.
My Father was a working class mechanic and machinist for a small, family owned business that contracted with the Big 3 (for you non Michiganders – these are the car companies that basically run the Michigan economy) and other machine shops in the region/state to provide parts to run all of the machinery you all love and enjoy. My Dad even designed a few tools that were later utilized by Craftsman. He was highly talented, super stubborn, and worked for that company from 1983 until a year prior to his death from thyroid cancer at the age of 59 – one month from his 60th birthday – in 2013.
My Mother was a homemaker and stay at home Mom. She raised me and my two sisters basically by herself. My Dad was constantly working and even he would have told you that how we turned out had “nothing to do with him”. My Mom did EVERYTHING. She had 3 very sick children who she learned keep to alive from day one…weekly ER trips, scrambling to find money for medicine so that we could breathe as we didn’t have health insurance at the time (late 80s, early 90s folks), cooking meals, making sure we learned how to take care of ourselves, and running our household. My Dad was a very, very impulsive person and dealing with our finances was never easy. My Mom taught me how to pinch a penny until it screamed for mercy along with every ounce of resilience she could muster teaching us. She took over our formal education in February of 1999 when all 3 of us girls had just barely cracked our pre-teens or early teens. My Mom taught me everything from how to do geometry to how to balance a check book, how to do my taxes, how to budget, how to think critically. I still remember having to watch the Presidential debates when George Bush JR was running and having to write a term paper based on his ideas vs our constitution and what my opinion was. AT 15. With a Mom who had 95-100% as an A threshold and anything below that as a B. She pushed us hard and we thrived.
Among all of this, we were an incredibly…incredibly….incredibly poor family. There were days when the kindness of strangers was the only thing that got us a meal on the table. After experiencing homelessness for a brief period when I was 10/11, we lived in a neighborhood where I learned how fast a house would go up in flames when a Molotov cocktail hit it, how fast the police would arrive to a domestic violence call or not, how a full city block next to us had to get shut down every Halloween because each house had a convicted sex offender living in it. We lived among gang activity, gunshots, suicides, theft. We lived among violence and had no real prospect of getting out of it as the economy began to fail. We grew up in a world that did not scream Privilege.
I still had it, though. As a white woman in America, regardless of my background, the inherent “goodness” that comes with having been born with alabaster skin to a working class family was still something I was able to reap the benefits of. I do not and have never had to wonder if a police officer was going to murder me in the street purely because of the color of my skin. I’ve never had to worry about how I was viewed. The police make me feel safe.
Check yourselves, peeps. You might think you get it, but unless you have lived through the years of what people of color have in our country…you quite literally don’t and cannot. And it’s okay to acknowledge that and use the benefits you have to help others. You don’t have to agree with the protests. But you do have an obligation to understand it.
Thank you 
