I was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy that can also claim a Jewish grandmother and right-of-return in Israel. One set of grandparents were kicked out of Harvard and Radcliffe respectively; the other set were kicked out of dirt farming Bastrop County TX by the Dust Bowl. One grandmother was a head librarian at a university, the other a telephone operator. One grandfather was a union plumber, the other a regional president of the AFL. In the company town I grew up in, all the sons of white privilege had their toilets cleaned by the brown people down the hill; one set of grandparents chummed around with the president of the "company" while the other set lived amongst the proles. My parents spent a combined 14 years in South America for the Peace Corps while I hung around all the hispanic and native american kids.

I'm as white as white can be and have lived all my life on the boundary between WASP and minority. I can play every privilege card and have seen every minority card played. Through one bloodline I traced my lineage far enough to know that my ancestors were routinely hung for stealing the horses of one of my friend's ancestors in Ireland; through another I have great-great-grandfather Mordechai Horowitz who gave up his jewelry store in Moscow for a greengrocer's stand in New York ahead of the Russo-Japanese war.

I'm white. I have it easy. But I've spent my life amongst those who don't so I know just how easy I have it. If I can't be comfortable in my skin nobody can. It's fashionable these days for privileged white kids to piss and moan about how rough they have it but the fact remains: white kids get the benefit of the doubt in all things at all times. I feel like we owe it to the world to be aware of it and to do everything we can to extend the same courtesy to everyone we meet.