The Social Mobility of White Men: A Personal Examination
I was once at a house party from whose balcony I could see my elementary school, 38th Street School.
It was night, I was in my early 20s. I had on a light blue Miller Lite workers button up, with the logo on the breast pocket, semi-faded jeans, matching high tops (very likely dookies), and an old school Milwaukee Brewers mesh hat.
Yes, this was during that point in time where Von Dutch had resurrected the trucker hat: that small window before we all decided to bury it deeper than it had ever been buried before.
The summer air was warm, or perhaps, the fall air was crisp.
It was the same year, or perhaps a different year, that I road on my first boat.
Maybe I was taken on a boat when I was very little, and don’t recall.
Certainly, I was, at least possibly, at one time or another before I turned 20, on a public boat: the type that give tours, or as I would find in my early 30s, host margarita parties.
But at the point in my life, that night when I had such a fly fit on I still remember it, I had not yet been on a small, privately owned boat. “Privately-owned boat” being longhand for what, I would learn latter, white people just called, “our boat”.
Elementary School: Cross Colours and Starter
At 38th Street school we had drive-by practices. As in, practices to hide from the bullets shot during drive-by shootings.
Students were told to duck and cover, not unlike the nuclear attack drills our parents practiced, only that ours, had a chance of working.
Across the street from the front of the school was a house whose yard was perpetually full of tires. This was not an organized yard of tires, it was more like if a dumpster had no walls.
The superintendent seemed to visit pretty often.
Every time he did, a voice on the overhead intercoms would bellow, “the superintendent has entered the building”. It seemed like a pretty important event, one we should exit our rooms, and perhaps gather in the auditorium, for?
Instead, like clockwork, after the superintendent had entered the building, students would be scurried inside the nearest classroom, whether it was their classroom or not, where we would be told to sit in our seats and be quiet, as our teachers would close and quickly lock the classroom door.
That’s because, “the superintendent has entered the building” was code for, “some random motherfucker we don’t know has entered the building”.
Hide your wife, hide your kids, etc.
Though 38th Street School’s location could be described as “hood-adjacent”, and arguably, “hood-in”, inside its walls was, by and large, an oasis.
An oasis where sometimes a student would fight a teacher, sure, but with teachers who, by and large, cared, and a building in which you felt safe enough to learn the joys of Oregon Trail twice a week.
I was there in 1995 when, as Ian M. Harris recalls in his 1996 essay for the Peabody Journal, Peace Education in a Postmodern World, Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited.
Staff at 38th Street School emphasize the concept peace works, and recognize student peacemakers on a daily basis.
Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from South Africa visited this school on May 15, 1995 and autographed his facsimile on a mural that contains depictions of 10 Nobel peace winners at the entrance to the school.
At this inner-city school, students write about peace, discuss what attributes a peacemaker holds, and create art activities on peace themes.
Students who are “stressed out” or are disruptive are sent to a “Self Direction and Responsibility Center” where they discuss in-depth their problems with an African American male safety aide attached to the school.
Source
Holy shit.
SDR is something I never imagined I would be reminded of, much less, reminded of by reading some academic article, 24 years later.
I had no idea it stood for “Self Direction and Responsibility”. I always wondered why “detention” was called “SDR”.
But I digress.
I was there when they painted that peace mural along the stairwell at the school’s main entrance.
I worked on it, possibly, or at least, beside it in the hallways while it was painted by my classmates under the guidance of a local artist.
However much I did or didn’t paint some of that mural, there was certainly a lot of focus on peacefulness when I went to 38th Street School.
I think of it now as a benefit I received, without having to risk what my classmates risked just by being born where they were born: the threatening presence of physical danger as a part of daily life.
In other words, with its child population growing up in and amongst violence, the reason MPS was so focused on peace in the 1990s was because its children experienced so much of its opposite.
The 80s and 90s may have been the first time that kids being killed for their clothes – often, by other kids – became a social phenomenon.
I just remember my parents did not feel safe (or cleverly hid the fact they couldn’t afford) sending us to school in a Charlotte Hornets Starter pullover, or pair of Jordans. All I wanted was a Cross Colours shirt.
Peace was the theme of our school, violence, of our clothes.
38th Street School in the early 90s: where stories of robberies, as exaggerated as they may have been, spread into urban myths, making the unattainably expensive all the more alluring.
I remember finding a Spurs hat in some discount bin and was successfully able to hide the fact that it was a Starter, thereby getting my parents to buy me, what amounted to at the time, the Holy Grail of fashion.
Grand Ave Middle School
Middle School: the worst of all the schools.
Not quite a teenager, not quite a kid, just some weird in-betweener,who was, unhelpfully, very, very sensitive to being called “weird” or “in-betweener”.
For after school activities at Grand Avenue Middle School students were corralled out the back door at the end of the day, to waiting buses. If you participated in after school activities you were then funneled back through the front door, through metal detectors, and passed student ID checkers, lest some sneaky superintendent sneak in amongst the chaos.
I saw a couple pretty bad fights there. Like, we should not be calling cops on kids in schools, but these kids were definitely committing aggravated assault.
But, I was also taught To Kill A Mockingbird by another student’s father, a practicing lawyer, who would sit us down every Wednesday lunch period, or some other day of the week, maybe at some other time of day, and lead a discussion about the chapter or two he had assigned the previous week.
It was my favorite class, and something that that I would latter learn was called, “college”.
I was also on a spelling bee team that won the MPS-wide tournament and got a free trip to Washington D.C. I was not great at spelling, but I was excellent at reading what our genius-level teammate Mark would write down, and saying that into a microphone.
Amidst these privileges punctured the outside world many, if not most, of my classmates lived in every day.
Violent bullies, marijuana, a shop class often overrun by nail fights where the craziest kids in our class would throw nails at each other from across the room as our teacher lost more and more control.
We are so determined to not make the same mistakes in life that we learn so many of the wrong lessons as children.
It was not my fault that there were kids whose home lives were enough of a problem they were termed, “home lives”. It was certainly not those kids faults they were born into those homes. Milwaukee, since I was a kid, has often been one of America’s poorest large cities.
With public school funding unjustly tied to local property tax, it was none of our faults that teachers were not paid nearly enough to wrangle us.
I learned to hide in the crowd for fear of drawing the attention of those wild kids, as prone to the “neck cracking” of other kids as they were.
My clothes were a mix of what I thought was cool – as often influenced directly by majority-Black schools I attended – and what I thought, subconsciously, wouldn’t stand out. This ended up – in the 90s – meaning flannels, things with sports teams on them, and making sure everything was as baggy as possible.
But Middle School – as scary as it was – was also the place I made my first best friends that I would have for years into adulthood. The place my art teacher turned me onto Fishbone.
And while my middle school was definitely hood-adjacent (some, again, would say hood-in) in location, it also brought me in touch with, we’ll call them, the Meyers.
On the edge of my friend circle, I got to go to a few sleepovers at the Meyers house.
The Meyers’ was a house full of rooms and Nerf guns, floors with multiple hallways, TVs in multiple rooms: a basement far enough away from the parents who, if awoke, would quickly shut down our midnight Nerf gun fights.
At this same time in my life I would have friends who wanted to come over to my house after school almost every night, never wanting to leave after dinner, hesitant to leave my parent’s car when we would inevitably have to drop them off at their aunt’s house.
My life was a mixture of class and race I didn’t understand.
I saw the problems of poverty in America, and I was starting to see some of the advantages my privilege would bring me: the toys of richer-than-me friends, the advanced learning classes, the trips to Washington D.C.
Because of my whiteness, and my maleness, I would watch as those sprinkled seeds would grow to stalks, stalks I found myself climbing, ever-so Jack like, into upper-middle class privilege.
Similarly, I lived in a mixed world of fashion.
I loved oversized hoodies and…Airwalks.
I cannot find anything on the internet to prove this but I remember clearly that Ross on Friends wore the below model of Airwalks – or the one with the white toe above, I can’t recall – and it reaffirmed my decision to purchase them.
This was probably the beginning of the end for Airwalk: when its mainstream success undermined its underground image.
At the same time, many at our school, white and hispanic alike, were getting into some seriously enormous jeans.
Brief aside: this interview/oral history of Airwalk is an amazing document and contains such images as the below.
While Middle School was socially painful, High School would find me attempting my most groan-inducing fashion statement to date: the anti-fashion fashion statement.
High School: Rejection of Fashion
High School, in terms of fashion, was not good.
In fact, not sure of who I was – a skater, a writer, a rapper, a basketball player who played on the tennis team – I turned to rejecting fashion as much as I could.
I had it in my rebellious, probably pretty depressed, pretty puberty-riddled brain, that rejection of fashion was not only possible, but demanded of those concerned with becoming good people, good artists.
I shopped at thrift stores and prized comfort above all else. Or, at least that’s what I told myself. As I now know, I was just avoiding participating in a world that frightened me.
As I would learn years later, from a silver-bobbed Meryl Streep, I actually had no choice in the matter. The only way to completely disengage from fashion was to wear no clothes at all.
This stuff’? Oh, ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic “casual corner” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”
Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada
The University of Minnesota
Arriving at The University of Minnesota was, and still is, the largest culture shock I have ever experienced.
I went from schools that were, mostly, majority Black, and certainly, majority-people of color, to:
Seeing large gatherings of Whites was, at first, disconcerting: on the “quad”, overflowing the lawns of frat rows on weekends, filling the rows of every classroom outside of the General College (RIP).
Suddenly, my whiteness was not unique. In fact, if you looked at me, there was (gasp) no telling how I was different than all the White people around me, White people I felt no connection with and feared being lumped in with.
So my urbanness became my identity.
My pants were still baggy, but now, with a renewed purpose.
My shoes were still sneakers, but now they had a self-righteousness to them.
Besides knowing what I didn’t want to be, sartorially, I had no idea what I was doing.
I honestly did not know there were this many of us Whites (this lack of knowledge is called “privilege”) and, over my time at the University of Minnesota, I grew uncomfortable – and then unsettlingly comfortable – with my growing “us-ness”, read: my social whiteness.
I turned to rapping, and joining the college spoken word collective, Voice Merging, but try as I might, or, not try at all – as was often my M.O. in college – I was already set on a path to collide with my full-blooded whiteness.
Soon I would be friends with people from the suburbs! I would play drinking games with plastic cups! I would go on a boat!
Wild, wild white people stuff.
I would meet kids who spent lots of money on alcohol without a second thought, who drove nice cars. And I would drink some of that alcohol and smoke in those nice cars. I would meet parents of friends who owned things like “houses that were on lakes” and I would enjoy those houses when invited.
My pants became less baggy, my hard “r” accent only coming out in my most emotional, or (often overlapping) my most inebriated moments, and my fitted caps became fewer and farther between.
This progression towards full honkydom did not regress after college.
Unemployment and a Call Center
I write for many reasons.
One of those reasons, probably, is to feel special.
There is nothing very much special about this story, which is why it is remarkable.
Or rather, why my story is worth remarking on is because of something I learned in one of those U of M classes: I could always take off my hoodie. If goth, I could always dress colorfully. If I wear Carharts and camouflage, I could always buy a dress shirt. If shabby, I could always clean up.
In that way, my whiteness is inescapable, even if I culturally don’t identify with a lot of White mainstream culture.
Case and point: my mid-20s and beyond.
After college I took the first job that paid me $15 an hour.
When I was laid off after the 2008 stock market crash wound its way to my first post-college industry, I found myself on unemployment.
After a while on unemployment, with other life choices not panning out well, I was determined that whatever job I found next I would take seriously. Believe it or not this was a new concept to me.
I would work hard, I told myself, and say “yes” to anything they asked me to do.
And I would, most importantly, perhaps, attempt to dress the part.
It worked.
In a room full of call center temps, that is to say, a room filled mostly with people without a college education and with darker skin than mine, I stood out.
I got asked to help with special assignments. I was confided in.
I met young adults who had titles like Coordinator and Manager right out of college, and who didn’t think twice about being given those titles.
I watched as a pipeline of such adults traipsed through hospital halls as consultants, standing up electronic health records across the country, racking up enormous hourly wages, bouncing from contract to contract.
Soon enough I would take it for granted that I could afford a spur-of-the-moment sushi happy hour (the term “afford” being used very literally at first, in that, I had enough money in my account at the moment of purchasing the sushi, to avoid washing the sushi restaurant’s dishes).
It would become normal for me to be in a crowded restaurant full of white people.
To no longer frequent Denny’s or Perkin’s.
To scoff at un-original plating.
What had in college been a random invitation or two to a friends house on a lake, became an awareness to the existence of dozens of such lakes, surrounded by hundreds of such houses, where white people went to use their boats, or just day drink near the water, during summer weekends and holidays, especially holidays.
Honestly, if you were to take a kid from the inner-city – white, black, hmong, chicano – and drop them in the middle of some populous lake on Memorial Day weekend, they could be forgiven for thinking that what they were witnessing was a well-organized conspiracy to keep lakes, the cars to get to them, the cabins to enjoy them from, the pocket cash for gas money and a weekend enjoying all Boat Life ™ activities: for the use of whites only.
It was at this time that I went full r/malefashionadvice. Danner boots, Allen Edmonds dress shoes, Calvin Klein slacks, Ralph Lauren khakis.
Embracing cultural whiteness – for those allowed to embrace it – pays. Or at least, it pays in the ways most of America is best paid: corporate white collar desk jobs.
This path that I traveled: growing up hood-adjacent to cozying up to the upper-middle class is what Republicans might call “pulling yourself up by your boot straps”.
I would call it “very lucky”, in that: I was lucky to be the white, college-educated man in that room when the openers of doors were there to open the doors of my life to a financially comfortable, white collar industry.
And while you still have to take advantage of the opportunities privilege affords you, I look back at my journey as a modification of Kanye West’s greatest line: working hard isn’t everything, not working hard, is.
Working hard helped me capitalize on opportunity. Privilege, in many ways, provided that opportunity.
Appearing to fit into the corporate culture based on my implementation of business casual argyle sweaters helped, growing up knowing Friends references helped, going to college with rich kids and learning how to talk around them helped, getting invited to parties by those rich kids because my skin color didn’t make them uncomfortable helped, knowing that liking bacon was a trendy thing in the late aughts/early teens helped, having parents have enough money to cover half of my college experience helped, having parents who instilled the attending of college as a given in me helped, and on and on.
I was allowed a late start because all I needed to do was throw on a cardigan.
My whiteness is not just people’s reaction to me while I’m shopping, or interviewing for a job, it’s all the things that lead up to that job interview, to that grocery shopping trip where I’m not stressed about the budget.
And the story of my whiteness is that whiteness helped me, even if the place I came from wasn’t where most white people came from.