I am a white male heterosexual.  Am I privileged? You’re damned right I am… 

I might have been born to a single mother with only a high school education and a biological father better absent than involved.  I could have happened to be born in Maoist China, or North Korea.  I could have been born in East Germany.  I could have been born 100 years ago or more.  Can you imagine what it must have been like to be born in Medieval Europe?  If you survived to be 3?  I was born in 1964 in the United States of America, a country that, for all its flaws and they are many, has been the single brightest beacon of freedom in the world for all of history.

Was I privileged by my parent’s wealth?  Absolutely!  But my parents did not measure wealth in dollars.  My father put off starting his own family until he was in his 40’s over twice my mother’s age.  He’d nearly given up on having a family of his own but, as the eldest son, had taken care of his mother and siblings when his father passed away from cancer at a young age.  When his siblings and mother were well taken care of, only then did he start to build his savings for his own future life.

My father understood  and conveyed that understanding to us his children, that wealth was knowledge, we weren’t asked if we were going to college only where.  My father understood and by his example taught us that wealth was wisdom; the wisdom to delay gratification and take responsibility for one’s self and one’s family and one’s community; the wisdom to save and invest and resist the impulse to fiddle in the summer hoping winter never comes.

My parents were not “feminists”.  But my father encouraged and supported my mother to continue her education and to earn a doctorate.  He wanted her to be independent when he passed away (given their age difference he expected her to survive him by many years).  My mother believed in being a strong woman but detested the movement she saw as trying to “empower” women to be more man-like rather than be powerful as women. 

My mother was raised dirt poor by today’s standards as well as the standards of her day if you traveled far from her rural Georgia hometown.  My mother related to us, repeatedly, how working as a child was not a summer occupation for spending money but a daily necessity to help in the support of the family.  She related to us how she picked cotton to make her first quarter’s tuition in college.  My mother was wealthy but her wealth was her audacity to believe she could climb out of the poverty of her youth and to become anything she set her mind to, a USAF officer, a mother of 4, and a college professor.  Her wealth was her understanding of the value of hard work, and perseverance through adversity.

I was privileged to be the son of a Mother and Father who married and then had children, parents who stuck together through some bitter arguments that are non-of-your-business but could easily have broken up a less dutiful couple; parents who invested in themselves early in life so they could have the resources to raise children and plan for their future; who invested in us, by providing a stable home, providing support for school and who provided us with the example of their lives to teach us what to do with that knowledge.  I could mention more, my siblings, my aunts and uncles and cousins all of who provided support and held us and each other to high expectations.

I am privileged to be born a son of Marvin Hamilton Baugh and Mary Rose Turner Baugh.  I am privileged to live in the United States of America in the 21^st Century.  I am privileged and proud and you’ll never convince me that these privileges have less to do with my success than did my race or gender or sexuality by a factor of 1000.