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YourBonusMom's avatar

I love this. I’m white, and grew up middle class with parents who grew up working class and attended college on the GI bill and athletic scholarships in the 60s. I attended the kind of fancy mostly white liberal arts college in the 80s where white girls spent hours mooning over Virginia Woolf…and I never “got it” either because even though I was white and educated I didn’t belong to that social class with generational wealth and privilege like my classmates who went to prep school. I did see the movie Orlando with Tilda Swinton back in the day and LOVED it, but when I read the book I wasn’t impressed…probably the only situation ever where I thought the film was better than the book…because the film eliminated a lot of the excess verbiage and Swinton delivered a performance that WAS political and gender queer. Thanks for the validation…40 years late is better than never LOL.

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Callie Palmer's avatar

I. Love. This. I'm one of the white kids. My dissociation happened in a 200 level Shakespeare class when I went back to college to start up an English degree after dropping out to finish drinking 12 or so years earlier. Two weeks into the semester, and I thought my eyes would get stuck from being rolled back in my head. Thanks be to the gods I was making up an F in Alex Kuo's Creative Writing/Poetry class. I asked him what I should do - feeling some kind of shame for not loving The Fucking Bard - and he told me to switch majors to American Studies. That did the trick. Then I got to read everything BUT old white people. Now I am an old white people, and still no regrets.

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