On realness in politics, and its links to geography

Paul Waldman writes in today's Washington Post under the headline, "I, too, am a hardscrabble American."  It's about Florida governor Ron DeSantis' effort to brand (or re-brand) himself as what is sometimes called a "real" American.  In any event, the "harsdcrabble" adjective caught my attention.  Here's an excerpt from Waldman's column:

Perhaps that’s why [DeSantis] has decided to search elsewhere for the salt-of-the-earth realness that Florida lacks. In his campaign book, he tells readers that despite a lifetime in Florida, he’s actually from Ohio, kind of:

I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.

Apparently, people in Florida do not work hard, fear God or love America — at least not the way they did in the redoubt of Rust Belt customs that was the DeSantis home.

Waldman's column takes up a silly dialogue that's been driving me crazy ever since Sarah Palin declared herself a real American who represented the Joe Six Packs (or was it Joe the Plumbers?) of Main Street, pitting herself and them against Barack Obama and Wall Street types.  I wrote about the recent iterations of who is a real American in my recent law review article on Rural Bashing (with Kaceylee Klein).  There I observe that Mary Peltola, recently elected Democratic congresswoman from Alaska, seems to get away with this sort of "real" people talk--that she's not been attacked from the Left as so many before her have--perhaps because she is a person of color.  

The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.

Sports, social class, and race (Part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part focuses on providing a framework to understanding the intersection of sports with social class and race.

In the movie Billy Elliot, a young, working class boy from County Durham in North East England finds that his talent is in the girls-only ballet class, much to the consternation of his hyper-masculine, coal-miner father. Billy's father much prefers boxing, which is more popular in their community and a traditionally masculine sport.

When Billy arrives in London to audition for the Royal Ballet, he is unsure how to communicate with his peers from elite backgrounds, and he ends up punching another dancer in frustration after his audition. The judges are horrified by Billy's act of violence and seem troubled that he could bring the violent mores of working-class County Durham to vaunted halls of the Royal Ballet.  

The thematic contrast between boxing and ballet that underpins Billy Elliot goes beyond a simple contrast between combat and artistry, but also makes clear that sports can reflect the preferences and mores of the social classes in Britain. But why is it that sports are classed? 

Bordieu’s Theory on Cultural Capital and Sports

French sociologist Pierre Bordieu helps explain the classing of certain sports through his theory of cultural capital. His theory posits that the consumption of goods helps reinforce social class because individual consumption tends to reflect the values and virtues of the consumer’s social class.

In the sports context, Bordieu theorizes that the aims of upper class sports tend to exemplify upper class virtues likes artistic quality, health maintenance, and individualism; while lower-class sports exemplify lower-class virtues such as competitiveness, violence, strength, and collective discipline. He uses the example of body building versus gymnastics to show this distinction. While body building produces a large, physical form that outwardly reflects the working-class virtue of a strong body, gymnastics is essentially body hygiene and maintenance, which reflects the upper class virtue of a healthy body.

Bordieu also gives significant weight to the perceived social profits of certain sports. The upper classes derive social profit from certain sports because those sports acquire distributional significance. This means that certain sports acquire significance among the social classes because of how their participation is distributed among the classes. For example, golf is available almost exclusively to the upper classes because it requires a large amount of leisure time and significant economic expenditure. With such a limited subset of individuals who can afford to participate, these sports become a technique of sociability, where the upper classes derive social value from mingling among themselves in a privileged space and differentiating themselves from the lower classes.

On the other hand, the lower classes derive significantly different social profits from their sports. For example, most team sports run counter to the strong individualism reflected in upper class sports like tennis and golf, because athletes derive social profit from collective discipline, sacrifice, and working towards a common objective. Combat sports like boxing or wrestling are truly working class because the violence inherent in their execution are anathema to the virtue of respectability in the upper class. Importantly, with the increased commercialization of sports, the social profits for the working class may turn into an economic profit for a talented few, as playing sports professionally can also be a way out of poverty.

In America, the enjoyment of sports is a classed affair. Social class is reflected in consumption preferences of fans, as inferred by advertising preferences, also reflects the classing of sports in America as well. While much attention is paid to which $7,000 to $650,000 wristwatch a golfer wears when they win stops on the PGA tour, the focus in NASCAR is on which cheap, working class beer will adorn the winning car, Miller High Life or Busch. Though class and elitism is less baked in than in Britain perhaps, consumption of American sports often has distributional significance, and remains a strong indicator of social class.

American Sports and Race

Another dimension outside of class that affects the consumption of American sports is race. In the past, consumption of certain sports was almost entirely restricted by race. For example, Major League Baseball was a literal white-man’s-game until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1945. The same was true of other major sports leagues as well. For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) - where today 74 percent of players are Black - did not integrate until 1950.

No explicit color barrier exists in American sports today, but there remain some very large racial disparities in sports fandom. For example, a full 92 percent of National Hockey League (NHL) fans are white, which is second only to NASCAR which boasts 94 percent white fans. Compare these figures to the demographics of fans of the National Basketball Association, where only 40 percent of fans are white and 45 percent are Black.

The fandom of these sports leagues also reflects participation in the highest-levels of the sport. For example, 80 percent of players in the NHL are white, and only 32 out of 800 active players are Black. This year will also be the first time that a Black driver will compete in NASCAR’s full Cup Series Schedule in 45 years. Meanwhile in the NBA, 80 percent of players are non-white.

However, while the NHL and NASCAR are obviously predominantly white sports they don’t always connote wealth. While the NHL has the highest share of fans who make more than $100,000 a year at 33 percent, the solidly middle class NASCAR has only half that at 14 percent. It seems that despite the reputation of hockey as a violent sport suitable for working-class toughs, perhaps a fairer characterization is that of the major American sports leagues, only NASCAR is a truly white working-class sport.

These statistics on race and American sports beg the question: if we are willing to accept that sports are a reflection of social class as Bordieu suggests, are sports also a reflection of race? Is being a fan of the NHL or NASCAR an expression of whiteness, as much as golf is an expression of being upper class?

Based on the extremely homogenized racial distribution of fans of American sports, I would say yes. When being a fan or participating in certain sports remains such a uniformly white experience, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that these sports have acquired what Bordieu would call distributional significance, but in the racial context as well. Participation in these sports helps reinforce distinctions between class and race by showing that someone is white, working class, or possibly both.

On population density and election outcomes (oh, and race)

Both the New York Times and National Public Radio are reporting today on the impact of suburban voters in recent elections.  In short, suburban voters are moving to the left, but their positions are often contradictory, and recent shifts are certainly no guarantee suburban voters will stay left.  The primary axis of analysis for these stories is population density, though the NYTimes pieces attends to race secondarily.

The New York Times Upshot feature leads with the big news out of Orange County, California in the 2018 mid-term elections:  no part of the county will be represented by a Republican congressperson in the coming session, and it's the first time that's happened since 1940.

The NYTimes quotes Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in California:

There is this idea that if all these suburban areas are blue, that will mean they’re automatically more progressive.

Geismer suggests that phenomenon is "an indication of something more progressive, she said, but underneath are “still commitments to a lot of kinds of inequality.”  The story provides these specific examples: 

[F]urther down the ballot in Orange County, voters also considered several propositions meant to ease the state’s housing crisis. Orange County voters opposed a bond to fund housing assistance programs, which passed statewide. And they rejected a rent-control measure by a wider margin than the rest of the state (the measure failed).

Thus, the New York Times concludes, "Newly Democratic Orange County is not exactly on its way to becoming liberal San Francisco."

[Geismer's] research on suburban Democrats identified many who supported liberal agendas in Washington while opposing affordable housing or school desegregation in their own communities. That dissonance reflects the particular politics of many suburban communities — politics that have made them a national battleground.

This reminds me of Edsall's piece, "The Democrats' Gentrification Problem" and David Brooks' recent piece, "The Rich White Civil War." 

The NPR story breaks things down region by region, focuses on suburban seats that flipped across the nation, including suburbs of Atlanta, Memphis, Denver, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Rochester, Jacksonville, San Bernardino County, Austin and Houston, among others.  Both stories feature some cool maps/infographics, and those are well worth a look.  The New York Times infographic breaks the analysis into six categories of places (as designated by CityLab) based on population density:  rural, rural-suburban, sparse suburban, dense suburban, urban-suburban, and urban.  The Times observes:   

After this election, there are no truly urban congressional districts represented by Republicans in Congress. The last and only one to flip was New York’s 11th, covering Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. Florida’s 25th, west of Miami, is the densest Republican district left.

And rural areas, the Times concludes, are now reliably Republican.  As for me, I'm still not sure why that is so--is it stasis and tradition? economic threat?   The story says rural voters focus on "individualism and limited government," which is certainly the stereotype.

The New York Times story mentions race only a few times--specifically, whiteness:

... changing nature of the suburbs and the changing preferences of white college-educated voters there who are repelled by the president.

... many highly educated, white suburban voters disagree with the Republican Party than the economic issues on which they’re better aligned.

The last paragraph of the story mentions "rural communities and white working-class voters" as similar, if not synonymous.

The story references minorities--presumably racial/ethnic minorities--twice:

.... as long as Republicans continue to seem uninterested in courting minorities...

and observing that well-off suburban voters' economic interests

simply aren’t aligned with poorer, minority Democratic voters who want more affordable housing, integrated schools or services funded by higher taxes. 

A NYTimes story about the health (or lack thereof) of the Democratic party in the American Midwest is here.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Do legal employers recruit class diversity?

When employers recruit for “diversity”, what are they looking for? Joan Williams, professor of law at U.C. Hastings, argues that class diversity should be one of the metrics employers pursue. You can read her September 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review here. As I read Williams’ article, I wondered to what extent employers already use class as a measure of beneficial diversity in hiring.

Because I’m a law student, I explored this by analyzing the diversity recruiting posts circulated at my school in the 2017-2018 school year. The law is not known as a particularly diverse profession, and it is becoming aware of the need to address that reputation. Big firms now often offer “diversity fellowships,” “diversity clerkships,” or “diversity scholarships.” These are paid internships at the firm, between the first and second years of law school, that are only available to “diverse” students. There are few other positions available in that first summer which are paid.

If these internships are only available to “diverse” students, how do the firms define diversity? I looked at 25 postings for internships of this type available to me in my first year of law school.

I found three approaches: the first approach was to list categories. This was the dominant mode. Of the 25 listings I analyzed, thirteen used this strategy and all thirteen explicitly mentioned racial or ethnic diversity. Nine discussed sexual orientation or being LGBTQ; seven included disability; seven listed socioeconomic status or economic disadvantage; four mentioned women or gender; two postings touched on religious diversity; two listed veteran status; and one included status as being the first in the family to attend college or purse an advanced degree. Of the seven that listed economic disadvantage, one firm considered that factor as a “boost” to the resume of an otherwise-diverse candidate, not a basis of diversity in and of itself. Finally, six postings included broad, “catch-all” language at the end of their enumerated lists, such as “…or others of diverse backgrounds.”

Is class, then, a category that recruiters seek? It depends on how “class” is defined. Education at the level of less than a college degree is perhaps the most common way to define the working class; by that metric, only one job posting is recruiting students from working-class backgrounds. If class is defined by income or socioeconomic disadvantage, however, class diversity is widely recruited. More than half of job posts listed socioeconomic disadvantage, making it one of the top four traits named. There is still, however, the question of perception: given that race is listed in every post, will white working-class students assume that “diversity” requires racial diversity as a prerequisite? Will they read far enough into the post to see the call for students of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and believe that they qualify on those grounds?

The second approach was to avoid defining diversity at all. Five posts used this tactic. These five used broad language like “underrepresented in the legal profession.” While this is an accurate description of the goals of diversity recruiting and is inclusive of a wide variety of experiences, it is extremely vague. It doesn’t help a job applicant know if they qualify for the position. Given the prevalence of the first approach, it seems likely that many law students will assume that these undefined listings intend to signal the same categories outlined above, of which race is dominant. Unless class migrants are aware that they qualify as “underrepresented in the legal profession,” believe that the employer will think so as well, and are able to articulate that with confidence, such broad language will not be effective in recruiting class migrants. This is especially true for white class migrants who will not qualify on racial or ethnic grounds.

In the final approach I saw in the job postings, diversity seemed not to reflect who the candidate is but rather what the candidate does. A few firms combined this approach with the enumerated categories described above, but many used this as a stand-alone tactic. A total of ten listings used some form of this tactic. These firms required the candidate to show a “commitment to diversity,” “efforts that promote diversity,” or even “involvement in diversity organizations.” One firm required that the candidate “[p]ossess an understanding of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.”

This approach seems unhelpful. Surely the point of having separate “diversity recruitment” is not simply to get people who believe in or work for diversity; that could be accomplished in the normal recruiting process. Moreover, this approach seems likely to work against class migrants. The sorts of organizations that “promote diversity” are normally non-profits which cannot pay their volunteers. People from a working-class background are less likely to have had the option to work without pay and add such organizations to their resume. I also wonder whether there exist sufficient organizations promoting class diversity for such experience to be widespread on the resumes of class migrants.

Based on this limited and admittedly not randomized sample, it seems that Williams is only partially correct, at least as to legal employers. While law firm diversity recruitment does not seem to prioritize class migrants, the firms arguably put some effort towards increasing class diversity. Slightly less than a third of posts discussed socioeconomic disadvantage or listed a background of less education. Personally, however, I am not convinced that, in the context of all the other posts, this recruitment will be as effective in recruiting class migrants as it could be.

Unpacking my invisible knapsack

Peggy McIntosh’s essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack inspired me to think critically about how privilege affects my life, and the racial privilege I enjoy. Unlike McIntosh, I cannot claim to benefit from white privilege in the way she, as a white woman, does. In fact, if my high school friends were around me, they would playfully remind me that I have a nopal en la frente (a prickly cactus on my forehead), meaning that I’m visibly Latinx. That’s not to say, however, that I don’t benefit from white privilege in certain contexts. Indeed, I benefit from colorism.

I’m driven to unpack my invisible knapsack because I vehemently believe in owning one’s s**t—in taking stock of the ways in which one’s race, gender, economic class, education, habitus, etc., facilitate or hinder one's life outcomes. Indeed, unpacking one's invisible knapsack entails bringing into consciousness the thoughts one selectively disregards to avoid confronting or admitting how they benefit from systems of power. For example, I’ve succumbed many times to the delusion that I made it and deserve to be in law school solely because of my hard work ethic, just like some of my classmates do. But I've made it law school for so many other reasons than a hard work ethic. I wouldn't be in law school had my father not toiled tirelessly as a gardener, or my mother not cleaned up after wealthy individuals in their houses. I get it though: it’s “cute” and psychologically advantageous to think in individualistic ways, but doing so doesn’t make that lie anymore true.

In her article, McIntosh accounts for how she benefits from structural systems of power. In writing, “when I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is,” she acknowledges that she benefits from history's Euro- and Anglo-centrism. Her personal confession helps disrupt toxic assumptions about history and knowledge as operating outside the reach of power, when in fact both are forged by and are a source of power. (See Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault.) And when she writes, “I can, if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time,” she draws attention to structural systems of power, such as social networks, employment, and housing practices, that make it easier for whites to associate with only whites.

Whereas McIntosh listed conditions that “attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location,” I'm hesitant to draw lines among the intersecting axes oppression that shape my life. I’m not just a broke immigrant, Latinx, femme-bear joto; I’m all of those things at once.

Here is my evolving list:

(1) Despite being born into a low-income Latinx family, I have a better chance of ascending to a higher class than some other ethnic/racial groups.

(2) When interacting with the police, I'm less likely to be shot by them if I'm unarmed.

(3) As a lighter-skinned Latinx, I can walk into a room knowing that others will not demean my intelligence as harshly as they would were I darker.

(4) It's easier to think of Latinx senators in D.C. as vying for and representing my interest since they are lighter skinned like me.

(5) As a lighter skinned Latinx immigrant, I can navigate and access certain spaces more easily (e.g., bookstores, public libraries, movie theaters, public buildings) because whites don’t immediately see me as threatening.

(6) Were I looking to do drag for a night, I could easily find my shade of foundation or powder at various price points.

(7) I can easily lose myself in a good telenovela because the majority of characters are lighter-skinned like me, and tha extends to the majority of Spanish-speaking programming.

(8) ...

As my list grows, I hope it inspires others to question the role privilege (of any form) plays in their lives, just like McIntosh’s essay did for me. And I hope the exercise fosters greater empathy and understanding in them.