One of the great characteristics of white privilege is the privilege of reinvention. White people can class jump, and nobody looks twice. You can go from having grown up below the poverty line, being routinely frisked against police cars, and having your peers shot by rival gangs, to being a graduate student, an editor, a writer, a professor, and it never occurs to anyone to think it odd that you are any of these things. Since you are educated and living a middle-class life, everyone seems to assume that probably your parents and their parents were from a similar cultural milieu. You can, by virtue of association with money or “culture,” be generally presumed to have that slippery thing sometimes called
breeding, and your previous life — your entire family’s lineage...