Recently, someone on Medium asked me if I have “white guilt.” One way to respond to this question is that I had nothing to do with being born the way I am. I happen to have “white” skin; I also happen to be half-Jewish and half gentile.
But in the deeper realm of understanding privilege and the world in which I grew up — 1950s and '60s small-town Alabama — then yes, I have an abundant supply of guilt. I had a good childhood; I was raised in an intact, though dysfunctional in its own way, family including my maternal grandmother. And I was a middle-class white person which gave me advantages like being able to walk anywhere I wanted and enter any establishment I wanted without being viewed with suspicion or hostility (at least until I grew my hair past my shoulders).
In my first essay collection, Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings From My Alabama Mother (Redhawk Publications), I wrote about a specific time and a close relationship I had with our family’s…maid, for that’s the term we used back then.
This Black woman, Dissie Shepherd, helped raise me. She cleaned me, fed me, hugged me, played games with me, and laughed with me when we watched I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show. Her laugh filled me with joy, and she made the best fried chicken and cornbread I’d ever tasted. I was privileged to know her, privileged to have her almost always in our house to comfort me, and privileged to be loved by her.