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We all have these memories, many of them fragments, that tend to stick around in our brains. Sometimes they mean something important. Other times they don't.
Deceptively simple but elegaic piece of writing. As LP Hartley wrote in perhaps one of the greatest opening sentences - The Past is a Foreign Country.. they Do Things Differently There. Right now in a hospital fearing the worst but soothed by those simple words. Thank you.
I, too, grew up in a first generation family. Everyone worked literally 16 hours a day. Every time someone brings up "white privilege" I am galled. Idiots, all.
The terminology gets confusing. My parents and I were immigrants, but we were considered "first generation", even though that might be technically incorrect.
My parents were immigrants. I was born here. Seems to me that makes me first generation American. But I agree with Niccolo -- it is sometimes confusing.
I love slice of life articles like this and the umarell article. Politics are important but they create anger and tension
These articles help us empathize with you as well as each other (as we share our own stories in the comments). They also remind us of what we are fighting for
Apr 25, 2023·edited Apr 25, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Yeah, I liked umarell a lot too. There's something helpful in talking about what's in front of us and what it has to do with the bigger picture. Maybe because it's a less abstract way of explaining what we are all seeing, but at eye level.
"White privilege." Bullshit. It is an ideological and political weapon. I know what my parents and their families went through. I could tell my own "worm picking" stories. I know the facts and the history. I know how two kind, smart, Catholic, charitable Christians and teachers dealt with Black people, to pick one item. If they and we are to be dismissed categorically, vilified, due to our skin color, now, that only confirms that this sick, vicious regime is founded on lies.
Maybe so. Someone needs to tell that to Ibram X. Kendi. Or, since he says that discrimination in the present and future is necessary to rectify discrimination in the past, maybe he’s getting his jollies watching two armies of white people slaughter each other.
I checked out Mr. Rogers, and it seems that his whole career depends on state supported ethnic division. I admire the grift, even if it's nasty, so good for him, but I wouldn't take any advice from Ibram.
Apr 26, 2023·edited Apr 26, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Every HR department in the country, corporate America, US government, public schools, the Department of Education, and all the other culture shaping institutions do take advice from him. Great grift indeed. Sucks to be us.
Your essay has provided objective evidence that there can be delight in melancholy... What an absolutely heart felt stroll down memory lane... On a related note, a friend of mine was of the opinion that our memories were the mechanism by which we could time travel... And I agree!
“…hipsterism was the Millennials’ way of tacitly accepting downward social and economic mobility.”
I became aware of hipsterism in high school (early ‘10s). Near its end, I believe? It was accepted as “cool but bizarre”; the trendsetter kids started wearing flannels and listening to Bon Iver.
It was just an aesthetic to us, but your friend’s quote makes it far more understandable in retrospect. Adaptation to decline. I’m not sure what has replaced it, but some elements like gentrification and food fetishism have simply folded into mainstream liberal culture.
Apr 25, 2023·edited Apr 25, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
In the USA, it was replaced by Millennial socialism. No joke, Bernie-worship and podcasts replaced Indie rock. Starting in 2020, most of them were just re-assimilated into the middle-class/upper-middle class Normie Dem world that spawned most of them in the first place, with some retaining "socialist" aesthetics a bit.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was successfully repackaging "vibrant neighborhood" hipsterism from circa 2007 as "democratic socialism" starting from circa 2015.
Apr 25, 2023·edited Apr 25, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
This was just nice to read. Thanks for sharing.
Made me want to write down some of my RAM too.
I grew up later and in a different, American context but lots of things felt very similar, reading what you wrote. Small, semi-rural town, experience with the big city and hipster bullshit later in life. Seemed exciting, but looking back it does seem like settling, and so many were/are so unhappy. Now I am reminiscent about my mother and father too, who were good, god-fearing people, with actual values, a work ethic and were just, well, male and female. Serbian immigrant family, 2nd/3rd generation. Very healthy. Wondering about the kids I grew up with, our collective joy/trauma and the affect it had on our future. 30 years does go by very fast.
Seems like a good exercise for all of us. Nice change of pace too.
Apr 25, 2023·edited Apr 25, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Yeah you should. I really think it helps us anchor our lives, or to find what anchors our life. Gives us a better sense of our identity and place, including in time. I also think we forget that we aren't that far removed from an immigrant in the family or someone that was poor or down on their luck at some point. People are so damn present that they really lose themselves in the immediate and superficial (which our phones absolutely make worse) and it makes it MUCH easier to rip into others for their privilege. Instead, it's not that simple and people should really step back, like you did here.
On a separate and not so nostalgic minded topic... The entire idea of "White Privilege" is nothing more than the renewal of racial discrimination stated in modern day terms, equating to the judgement of an individual or group of individuals based upon their skin color. The not so amazing amazing thing about it is the government support that it garners, both then and now... the surprising thing about it is the difference in the reason(s) why.
I started a worm farm when I was like 10. Me and the neighborhood kids built a huge mulch pile, watered it, threw in old eggs, watermelon rinds, and whatever else we thought worms liked.
It kinda worked. Within months we had a pile of worms, that we then put into old Dixie cups to try and sell to fishermen down at the docks.
I think we netted $5s in two days of pitching worms. We gave up, and switched to collecting aluminum cans. Which netted us another $10 in a month of work.
Excellent article, can relate on several levels: Italian immigrant family wife; a Welsh friend who raves (-ed?) about the opportunity in Canada; and have also watched my childhood paved over, not for the better.
The Italians did sowing, and meat packing on "Sanglaro" Avenue.
Apr 25, 2023·edited Apr 25, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Toronto is even more pretentious and self-absorbed now.
“The way we were raised was wrong and evil, so say you to your bemused euro pals contemplating North America’s insanity.
Some others:
Adrian Vermeule, Post Liberal Substack
“ the common theory central to liberalism, and it’s associated political movements is that liberty requires the throwing off of all unchosen constraints, which the Liberal counts as coercion an arbitrary oppression.”
John McWorter
“ CRT teaches that the heart of all educational, moral and artistic endeavour must be the battling of differentials.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media,1964
“ the mark of our time is it’s revulsion against imposed patterns”
NS Lyons, Upheaval substack
“ The gathering darkness of the totalitarianism we face seems to be nothing less than a Faustian effort to deconstruct everything it means to be human”
Clever Pseudonym, Substack reader
“ The left has captured the means of cultural production, they repudiate but do not replace. “
The plot of pretty much every Hollywood movie since around 1965 or so can be summed up as "I gotta be me!" If you are true to your real authentic self at the expense of everyone and everything else, good things will follow.
Nostalgia...when you first start to feel it you know the clock is ticking and you are getting older. The visible passage of time affronts assumptions of our permanence.
Some of my fondest memories are of the apartment block my parents made their first home in, the neighbour's little dog (Minnie-poo the maltese terrier), and the common laundry which had a copper (a big vat made of pure copper in which you placed dirty clothes which you left in water heated to boiling, perfect for my cloth nappies). Today most people have never even heard of coppers and are often disgusted at the idea of cloth nappies.
The white privilege narrative is central to the emerging social order. The period of peak economic privilege for the upper middle class began with the petrodollar in the 70s and is now rapidly winding down. Cheap credit meant debt peonage for the masses, but it also gave many in the class above them access to the great asset bubbles of real estate and the stock market. These created a whole strata of people with an extraordinary sense of entitlement and aspirations to match. The deindustrialised West cannot afford to fulfill these aspirations anymore. Since 2008 the West has had to adjust to a permanent state of economic uncertainty. The West now needs to legitimise capitalism by diversifying both the elite and near-elite classes, shrink the number of managers and professionals, reduce the expectations of these for autonomy and recognition and manage downwardly mobile white collar whites displaced by diversity and immigration by Third World elites. 'White privilege' fits the bill perfectly. It both demoralises and delegitimises some, while justifying the redistribution of opportunity and inclusion to others.
The unfairness is irrelevant. The danger to the existing order is that the narrative fosters identity politics amongst whites. Judging by twitter, I suspect that is happening at warp-speed.
"Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, because nobody believes in God anymore. Buying on credit is the opiate of the masses." A high school history teacher of my acquaintance, who also was a member of the Communist Party, USA.
"The West now needs to legitimise capitalism by diversifying both the elite and near-elite classes, shrink the number of managers and professionals, reduce the expectations of these for autonomy and recognition and manage downwardly mobile white collar whites displaced by diversity and immigration by Third World elites."
Anyway, surplus elites are the most dangerous class, historically speaking. Examples include middle Europe before 1848, late Imperial Russia, and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s.
I suspect that the surplus members of the elite as well as aspirants will split into four broad groups.
Some will seek to remain within the elite by serving the system. These will become elite loyalists. Ultra woke. Visibly and audibly 'Left' (but OK with standard corporatist and crony capitalist economics). Whatever political and social agency they have will be focused on policing the masses or members of their own class.
Some will simply accept social demotion or downward mobility and adapt to life within whichever modest (or abject) strata they fall. Many of these may wear MAGA baseball caps and swear at the TV, but they will have no agency or effective political representation.
Others will seek to regain status by destroying the regime. These, if white, will join the angry or dissident Right. Depending on taste or circumstance, these will perhaps become either trads, straightforward fascists (or fascist wannabes) or populists. These will eventually fill the gaols or, if lucky, will wear ankle monitors while they are young enough to cause trouble.
Still others will simply disengage altogether. The emergence of a dissident vitalist current, interested in aesthetics, culture etc, suggests that this is already happening. The online vitalists seem (and it is only an impression) likely to belong disproportionately to the newly disenfrachised or marginalised (NEETS, the chronically underemployed). They may seek consolation in the fiction that they are preparing an alternative elite but this is just a cope.
The Ultra Woke are in for some very cruel surprises. They are exposed to maximum professional competition with BIPOCs (foreign and domestic), as well as maximum interpersonal hostility from fellow whites and their masters in the genuine elite secretly regard them as useful but deeply obnoxious scum and a total joke.
Re your second case, the incongruency between feeling, belief and the messy wider social world is increasingly common. It is kind of post-modern in a sense, an incoherent adaptation to a fragmented world with irreconcilable contradictions.
Orban's solution to the elite problem was to negate their votes by targeting the lowest classes.
This reached a point where Budapest Liberals not only stopped pandering to Gypsies, but they now openly resent them, as they vote for Orban. (Their outlook on life, chiefly income has improved 2-3X since 2010.)
The weakness of the Left is the same contradiction inherent to "successful" committees: they're not interested in solving social issues, because doing so would make them redundant. They want to increase the dependency of the lower classes on handouts. Once any Gypsy kid can earn more in construction than some office drone in Budapest, what can they really offer them?
They still run with the meme that Orban is buying Gypsy votes with a bag of potatoes, even though they're fully aware of the horrendous quotes they would get for any physical labor related work around their home from the very same classes. Cheap labor is over, has been for a long while. But, when they still bring this meme up, instead of contradicting them, I just tell them it's great, a bag of potatoes negating the vote that cost thousands of hours of Netflix-adjacent programming for a Budapest Liberal.
That was an insightful and moving piece. I especially resonate with "I think about my mother the worm picker whenever I come across the term 'white privilege'. I think about my father the steelworker working six double-shifts a week. I think about how the two of them arrived in Canada with 500 Deutschmarks given to them by my mother’s father, and with me in tow, unable to speak a word of English. I was privileged, but not in the way that those who carelessly toss around the charge of 'white privilege' assume. The privilege was in how I was brought up and who brought me up. It had absolutely nothing to do with our racial attributes. We came from nothing, and nothing was handed to us." People born in North America who throw the term "white privilege" around so nonchalantly and pigeonhole everyone with the same skin color need to read and listen to more stories of immigrants, their tribulations and triumphs, often coming with nothing but hope in safety, freedom, and prosperity.
Hit the like button at the top of the page to like this entry. Share this across social media using the share or re-stack buttons. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
We all have these memories, many of them fragments, that tend to stick around in our brains. Sometimes they mean something important. Other times they don't.
Also: some of you may have missed the weekend Substack which was posted late - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/saturday-commentary-and-review-121
Deceptively simple but elegaic piece of writing. As LP Hartley wrote in perhaps one of the greatest opening sentences - The Past is a Foreign Country.. they Do Things Differently There. Right now in a hospital fearing the worst but soothed by those simple words. Thank you.
Yikes. Good luck.
Sorry to hear that Denis. I noticed you haven’t been in the comments much recently. All the best.
I, too, grew up in a first generation family. Everyone worked literally 16 hours a day. Every time someone brings up "white privilege" I am galled. Idiots, all.
I'm confused; do you mean a "Gen-Zero" family (where the parents are immigrants, making Niccolo "first-generation")?
The terminology gets confusing. My parents and I were immigrants, but we were considered "first generation", even though that might be technically incorrect.
My parents were immigrants. I was born here. Seems to me that makes me first generation American. But I agree with Niccolo -- it is sometimes confusing.
I love slice of life articles like this and the umarell article. Politics are important but they create anger and tension
These articles help us empathize with you as well as each other (as we share our own stories in the comments). They also remind us of what we are fighting for
Yeah, I liked umarell a lot too. There's something helpful in talking about what's in front of us and what it has to do with the bigger picture. Maybe because it's a less abstract way of explaining what we are all seeing, but at eye level.
"White privilege." Bullshit. It is an ideological and political weapon. I know what my parents and their families went through. I could tell my own "worm picking" stories. I know the facts and the history. I know how two kind, smart, Catholic, charitable Christians and teachers dealt with Black people, to pick one item. If they and we are to be dismissed categorically, vilified, due to our skin color, now, that only confirms that this sick, vicious regime is founded on lies.
White privilege died in Bakhmut.
Maybe so. Someone needs to tell that to Ibram X. Kendi. Or, since he says that discrimination in the present and future is necessary to rectify discrimination in the past, maybe he’s getting his jollies watching two armies of white people slaughter each other.
I checked out Mr. Rogers, and it seems that his whole career depends on state supported ethnic division. I admire the grift, even if it's nasty, so good for him, but I wouldn't take any advice from Ibram.
Every HR department in the country, corporate America, US government, public schools, the Department of Education, and all the other culture shaping institutions do take advice from him. Great grift indeed. Sucks to be us.
Well, I'm sure Leninism will work out this time.
As a Hungarian, I would treat this as a self-defense situation. Especially if it marks me out as the kulak.
People don't get that accusations of "privilege" means someone hates you more than you ever theoretically hated them.
Your essay has provided objective evidence that there can be delight in melancholy... What an absolutely heart felt stroll down memory lane... On a related note, a friend of mine was of the opinion that our memories were the mechanism by which we could time travel... And I agree!
I need to add some humourous ones as well for good measure.
“…hipsterism was the Millennials’ way of tacitly accepting downward social and economic mobility.”
I became aware of hipsterism in high school (early ‘10s). Near its end, I believe? It was accepted as “cool but bizarre”; the trendsetter kids started wearing flannels and listening to Bon Iver.
It was just an aesthetic to us, but your friend’s quote makes it far more understandable in retrospect. Adaptation to decline. I’m not sure what has replaced it, but some elements like gentrification and food fetishism have simply folded into mainstream liberal culture.
In the USA, it was replaced by Millennial socialism. No joke, Bernie-worship and podcasts replaced Indie rock. Starting in 2020, most of them were just re-assimilated into the middle-class/upper-middle class Normie Dem world that spawned most of them in the first place, with some retaining "socialist" aesthetics a bit.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was successfully repackaging "vibrant neighborhood" hipsterism from circa 2007 as "democratic socialism" starting from circa 2015.
and tourism, unbridled and cheap tourism...which is also just another way of consuming and showing status without really understanding anything.
This was just nice to read. Thanks for sharing.
Made me want to write down some of my RAM too.
I grew up later and in a different, American context but lots of things felt very similar, reading what you wrote. Small, semi-rural town, experience with the big city and hipster bullshit later in life. Seemed exciting, but looking back it does seem like settling, and so many were/are so unhappy. Now I am reminiscent about my mother and father too, who were good, god-fearing people, with actual values, a work ethic and were just, well, male and female. Serbian immigrant family, 2nd/3rd generation. Very healthy. Wondering about the kids I grew up with, our collective joy/trauma and the affect it had on our future. 30 years does go by very fast.
Seems like a good exercise for all of us. Nice change of pace too.
I'm thinking that I should collect these thoughts and memories while they are still in my head.
Yeah you should. I really think it helps us anchor our lives, or to find what anchors our life. Gives us a better sense of our identity and place, including in time. I also think we forget that we aren't that far removed from an immigrant in the family or someone that was poor or down on their luck at some point. People are so damn present that they really lose themselves in the immediate and superficial (which our phones absolutely make worse) and it makes it MUCH easier to rip into others for their privilege. Instead, it's not that simple and people should really step back, like you did here.
On a separate and not so nostalgic minded topic... The entire idea of "White Privilege" is nothing more than the renewal of racial discrimination stated in modern day terms, equating to the judgement of an individual or group of individuals based upon their skin color. The not so amazing amazing thing about it is the government support that it garners, both then and now... the surprising thing about it is the difference in the reason(s) why.
I started a worm farm when I was like 10. Me and the neighborhood kids built a huge mulch pile, watered it, threw in old eggs, watermelon rinds, and whatever else we thought worms liked.
It kinda worked. Within months we had a pile of worms, that we then put into old Dixie cups to try and sell to fishermen down at the docks.
I think we netted $5s in two days of pitching worms. We gave up, and switched to collecting aluminum cans. Which netted us another $10 in a month of work.
I hope your mom did better than that
On good days they made better money than line workers at Ford or Chrysler. But it wasn't consistent due to reliance on weather, which is finicky.
This may sound odd, but have you read Solenoid? That huge Romanian novel that is the rage for literary types?
I got some big issues with it, but the parts of it grounded in the reality of 70s Romania are really good.
No! But I have heard of it.
Parts of this piece reminded me of the good parts of it.
Excellent article, can relate on several levels: Italian immigrant family wife; a Welsh friend who raves (-ed?) about the opportunity in Canada; and have also watched my childhood paved over, not for the better.
The Italians did sowing, and meat packing on "Sanglaro" Avenue.
Toronto is even more pretentious and self-absorbed now.
“The way we were raised was wrong and evil, so say you to your bemused euro pals contemplating North America’s insanity.
Some others:
Adrian Vermeule, Post Liberal Substack
“ the common theory central to liberalism, and it’s associated political movements is that liberty requires the throwing off of all unchosen constraints, which the Liberal counts as coercion an arbitrary oppression.”
John McWorter
“ CRT teaches that the heart of all educational, moral and artistic endeavour must be the battling of differentials.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media,1964
“ the mark of our time is it’s revulsion against imposed patterns”
NS Lyons, Upheaval substack
“ The gathering darkness of the totalitarianism we face seems to be nothing less than a Faustian effort to deconstruct everything it means to be human”
Clever Pseudonym, Substack reader
“ The left has captured the means of cultural production, they repudiate but do not replace. “
The plot of pretty much every Hollywood movie since around 1965 or so can be summed up as "I gotta be me!" If you are true to your real authentic self at the expense of everyone and everything else, good things will follow.
You got that right pussycat
Except they don't. The authentic self is mostly a parody of something portrayed in advertising.
I think that Limonov was right: think for yourself but live for others.
Loved this - brought back some of my own memories for which I’m grateful
Nostalgia...when you first start to feel it you know the clock is ticking and you are getting older. The visible passage of time affronts assumptions of our permanence.
Some of my fondest memories are of the apartment block my parents made their first home in, the neighbour's little dog (Minnie-poo the maltese terrier), and the common laundry which had a copper (a big vat made of pure copper in which you placed dirty clothes which you left in water heated to boiling, perfect for my cloth nappies). Today most people have never even heard of coppers and are often disgusted at the idea of cloth nappies.
The white privilege narrative is central to the emerging social order. The period of peak economic privilege for the upper middle class began with the petrodollar in the 70s and is now rapidly winding down. Cheap credit meant debt peonage for the masses, but it also gave many in the class above them access to the great asset bubbles of real estate and the stock market. These created a whole strata of people with an extraordinary sense of entitlement and aspirations to match. The deindustrialised West cannot afford to fulfill these aspirations anymore. Since 2008 the West has had to adjust to a permanent state of economic uncertainty. The West now needs to legitimise capitalism by diversifying both the elite and near-elite classes, shrink the number of managers and professionals, reduce the expectations of these for autonomy and recognition and manage downwardly mobile white collar whites displaced by diversity and immigration by Third World elites. 'White privilege' fits the bill perfectly. It both demoralises and delegitimises some, while justifying the redistribution of opportunity and inclusion to others.
The unfairness is irrelevant. The danger to the existing order is that the narrative fosters identity politics amongst whites. Judging by twitter, I suspect that is happening at warp-speed.
"Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, because nobody believes in God anymore. Buying on credit is the opiate of the masses." A high school history teacher of my acquaintance, who also was a member of the Communist Party, USA.
"The West now needs to legitimise capitalism by diversifying both the elite and near-elite classes, shrink the number of managers and professionals, reduce the expectations of these for autonomy and recognition and manage downwardly mobile white collar whites displaced by diversity and immigration by Third World elites."
Anyway, surplus elites are the most dangerous class, historically speaking. Examples include middle Europe before 1848, late Imperial Russia, and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s.
I suspect that the surplus members of the elite as well as aspirants will split into four broad groups.
Some will seek to remain within the elite by serving the system. These will become elite loyalists. Ultra woke. Visibly and audibly 'Left' (but OK with standard corporatist and crony capitalist economics). Whatever political and social agency they have will be focused on policing the masses or members of their own class.
Some will simply accept social demotion or downward mobility and adapt to life within whichever modest (or abject) strata they fall. Many of these may wear MAGA baseball caps and swear at the TV, but they will have no agency or effective political representation.
Others will seek to regain status by destroying the regime. These, if white, will join the angry or dissident Right. Depending on taste or circumstance, these will perhaps become either trads, straightforward fascists (or fascist wannabes) or populists. These will eventually fill the gaols or, if lucky, will wear ankle monitors while they are young enough to cause trouble.
Still others will simply disengage altogether. The emergence of a dissident vitalist current, interested in aesthetics, culture etc, suggests that this is already happening. The online vitalists seem (and it is only an impression) likely to belong disproportionately to the newly disenfrachised or marginalised (NEETS, the chronically underemployed). They may seek consolation in the fiction that they are preparing an alternative elite but this is just a cope.
Accurate.
One of the wokiest wokesters I know is an unsuccessful member of the PMC, trying very hard to cling to the indicia of PMC status.
Another person I know who didn't make the PMC cut can be most politely described as "alt-right" (although happily married to a black lady).
The Ultra Woke are in for some very cruel surprises. They are exposed to maximum professional competition with BIPOCs (foreign and domestic), as well as maximum interpersonal hostility from fellow whites and their masters in the genuine elite secretly regard them as useful but deeply obnoxious scum and a total joke.
Re your second case, the incongruency between feeling, belief and the messy wider social world is increasingly common. It is kind of post-modern in a sense, an incoherent adaptation to a fragmented world with irreconcilable contradictions.
If so, go BIPOCs! ✊🏿
Orban's solution to the elite problem was to negate their votes by targeting the lowest classes.
This reached a point where Budapest Liberals not only stopped pandering to Gypsies, but they now openly resent them, as they vote for Orban. (Their outlook on life, chiefly income has improved 2-3X since 2010.)
The weakness of the Left is the same contradiction inherent to "successful" committees: they're not interested in solving social issues, because doing so would make them redundant. They want to increase the dependency of the lower classes on handouts. Once any Gypsy kid can earn more in construction than some office drone in Budapest, what can they really offer them?
They still run with the meme that Orban is buying Gypsy votes with a bag of potatoes, even though they're fully aware of the horrendous quotes they would get for any physical labor related work around their home from the very same classes. Cheap labor is over, has been for a long while. But, when they still bring this meme up, instead of contradicting them, I just tell them it's great, a bag of potatoes negating the vote that cost thousands of hours of Netflix-adjacent programming for a Budapest Liberal.
That was an insightful and moving piece. I especially resonate with "I think about my mother the worm picker whenever I come across the term 'white privilege'. I think about my father the steelworker working six double-shifts a week. I think about how the two of them arrived in Canada with 500 Deutschmarks given to them by my mother’s father, and with me in tow, unable to speak a word of English. I was privileged, but not in the way that those who carelessly toss around the charge of 'white privilege' assume. The privilege was in how I was brought up and who brought me up. It had absolutely nothing to do with our racial attributes. We came from nothing, and nothing was handed to us." People born in North America who throw the term "white privilege" around so nonchalantly and pigeonhole everyone with the same skin color need to read and listen to more stories of immigrants, their tribulations and triumphs, often coming with nothing but hope in safety, freedom, and prosperity.
Thanks for sharing all this.
There might be a tiny typo here (there, I assume):
“the culture over their insists that not only the way that we were raised was wrong, but that it was also evil”
Good eye. Thank you.