Don't Be Ashamed

This is my annual Christmas letter to my grandson:

Dear Ben:

This year, a flurry of hurtful, destructive social movements have erupted in our society which are all directed at you.  Exactly how a six year old can be so roundly condemned just for existing is never explained.  But, you were born a white male American and because of that you are guilty of so called "white privilege," as well as "toxic masculinity," and "national guilt.  I will address only "white privilege" in this letter and do it from my own experience and family history.

Let me begin with this.  Your are not guilty of anything unless you actually did something wrong.   Never let anyone force false guilt upon you when you have done no wrong.

So called "white privilege" is a bad joke to a southerner from a poor background. 

Your great grandfather William Kumpe was effectively orphaned as an infant.  His father could not care for him.  So, he was "adopted" by a great aunt from the Cherokee side of the family and raised by her and her full blood husband. In the 1930's when the crops failed, your white great grandfather, his Uncle John and Aunt Ada all moved to California to get a fresh start.  They were living in the desert in a tent outside San Diego raising hogs.  Dad would cut up old inner tubes and lard cans to make rabbit traps.  He told me he got pretty good at it.  What they didn't eat themselves Dad traded to their Mexican neighbors for tamales.  Dad loved tamales for the rest of his life and learned passable Spanish from the experience.

Dad was once falsely accused and disciplined for theft in a California school just because he was an Okie.  Okies and Arkies just weren't the kind of people the Californians wanted in their school system.  Fifty years later, Dad still recalled the hurt of the way he was treated.  

The Californians hated Okies so badly that they would do just about anything to get rid of them.  Dad, Uncle John and Aunt Ada were literally deported from California.  Legally banned.  Thrown out.  Forced to leave.  Their crime?  Uncle John got sick.  He contracted tuberculosis.  Uncle John was too sick to drive so Dad drove their Model T pickup from San Diego back to Sallisaw to get them home.  He was 13 years old at the time.

There is no "white privilege" on your great grandmother's side either.  She and her parents were sharecroppers.  Sharecropping replaced slavery after the civil war.  Sharecropping had several advantages for the unscrupulous land owner.  It was not limited to blacks.  You didn't have to buy your workers and you didn't have to feed or care for them.  They lived on credit with the local store which the landowner often owned or at least controlled.  And, when they got behind in their rent (which they always did because the system was designed that way, one crop out of five would always fail) you could evict them and start over.  There were always more desperate people ready to take on that worked out piece of land on because it would at least feed them something and let them get credit at the store.  Sharecropping on long odds was still better than being a burden on relatives or worse being homeless.

Your great grandmother Rubye Burchfield's family was abandoned by their socialist political agitator father when the Ku Klux Klan showed up to horsewhip him for not providing for his wife and children.  He ran away through the cotton fields and never came back, literally leaving a wife and three hungry children with a crop in the field to be brought in.  Their already difficult life went downhill from there.  Your great, great Uncle Ervin (Robert's father) suffered with a bowed and twisted back the rest of his life from using a huge crosscut saw to cut firewood while his mother worked.  He was ten years old when he ruined his back.  


This so called "white privilege" leaves other marks as well.  You never saw my Dad, your great grandfather, in a pair of shorts.  He was ashamed of his legs.  He suffered from rickets as a child.  That is caused by malnutrition.  His legs were badly deformed.  The poverty of the southern diet touched me in a different way.  In my toddler years, Mom used to feed me a spoonful of an intensely flavored meat gravy base every day.  I had developed a nutritional problem due to lack of meat in our diet and the paste was a cheap way to supplement it. 

I grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing.  We used an outhouse and took our very occasional baths in a tin tub on the kitchen floor.  We drew our water from a well.  A thick layer of coal dust would settle in the bottom of the bucket.  The water tasted awful and everything we cooked tasted like it.  But, we were better off than some of our neighbors because we got propane heat in 1954 to replace the wood stove and electricity in 1955 to replace the kerosene lanterns.  Some of our white neighbors had neither.  I have a faint burn scar on my cheek from the time when, as a toddler, I fell against the nearly red hot wood stove.

But, you would think sooner or later this "white privilege" would have caught up with me and I would have benefited from it.  In the late 1990's I had been unemployed for over a year and needed a part time job desperately to pay for lunches and gasoline while I was going to college at nearly fifty years old to start a new career ... again.   I was the only person on campus who applied for the job.  It was a technical position and I was overqualified for it.  The refusal letter from the black director of human resources simply said that they were "withdrawing the job opening until they could recruit from a more diverse pool of applicants."

Three years later in law school, I applied for "gateway" student job in the Federal Court System.    The only thing attractive about the job was that it employed you in the federal system where you could apply for other federal jobs after a reasonable length of time.  The job involved among other things, observing federal probationers urinate into a sample bottle to make sure that they weren't substituting someone else's.  It was a tough job but it was a start.  And I needed a "start" badly.  The lead Probation Officer who interviewed me chewed me out for wasting his time, told me that I had already had my chance at a career earlier in life and blown it and that now I was not much better than a bum.  Seeing the look in my eyes as he berated me, he then warned me that if I made trouble for him, I would have a hard time practicing in Federal Court.

Only a deluded leftist ideologue could find anything that remotely looked like "white privilege" in your family history.

That is not to say that your family did not have certain advantages but those advantages had nothing to do with race.  We were born Americans, heirs to a political and social system where there are no official barriers to advancement.  We were born into Christian families whose Protestant work ethic and respect for the law has always provided an advantage in life over those who do not share it.  But, these "advantages" are available to all regardless of the color of their skin.

Dr. Martin Luther King taught that we should judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin.  My mother taught me that long before Dr. King spoke it and I have tried to live by it. You should do the same.

God bless Ben.


Your Grandfather Bill