The Right Kind of Minority

This post expresses something I always think whenever I hear the "compelling" story of someone we're supposed to admire who started life in poverty but ended up getting an Ivy League education and a marvelous career.

Like my reader, and I'm sure a lot of other Americans, I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their "compelling stories"?

Nobody cares about the white working poor's "compelling stories." If you're white, you don't overcome adversity, discrimination or poverty. You were full of racist horseshit for having the audacity to think you struggled to succeed. Ugh.