Let me tell you something. Sometimes I wonder if I am lying. If I fabricate .. Were we really that broke growing up? Was I really so displaced by the divorce? Didn't I have it good? Using my cunt and empty wallet as some backstage pass to gain credibility in social circles where you're only as good as your last anecdote validating the corruptive influence of capitalism?
The understanding is that the personal is political and if you're going to be political- your personal life better have been effected by the social constructs you're fighting against.
I sit in meetings where well-off professors and struggling students theorize and strategize about the issue of Class. And there's a push, just like at an evangelical healing ... to come forth, kneel down, and beg for an answer to all of your social ills. Now is when I take my life and put it behind a a frosted glass... recognizable, but blurry. I talk about my childhood, my school growing up, my mother. I always feel dirty afterwards, exploitative.

Three men and one woman have congregated in the back of the car. They are from Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Alabama. I listen to their accents and think of my own, never noticeable in Jersey, but always a topic of conversation when I travel. I recall the feeling I get when it happens - the pride in being assosciated with a larger group, with a home. And it always leads to the romanticism of my home, a faraway look when describing it -- the traveler's relationship the home.
Each time I describe all of this at a meeting or in conversation about politics.. I get that look. Even though I have not traveled far, I am 20 minutes away from home, but Mahwah might as well be a different state to me. Maybe that is the issue, I feel like I stick out. But I don't, do I? I am white .. I can go unnoticed. And as generally futile as I believe "white guilt" to be, I participate during these moments.

We pass through Paterson and I look out the window on my "home".. or at least a town away from my home. I have evoked this name often -- as another badge, another indicator seperating me from the those well-off professors I sit in those groups with. I look out at warehouses with broken windows, yards crowded with garbage, and auto part stores with rusted bumpers piled on their roofs.
I never claimed to live this reality. I am honest, I have to be. I can only talk about what I know.

Looking out this window I feel distant and removed from this scene. Is it my whiteness that removes me? That makes this scene feel like it must be a movie and the window a projector screen? Have I taken any of this on as my own? Is this a disservice to them or shouldn't more people be doing the same: Writing painful scenarios into their life's narration?