Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class

While we long to be understood and loved, and as we seek a just world in which all beings might be so appreciated, our first task is to see ourselves—a process, inevitably, of casting off the false descriptions that a deranged world provides.

I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country’s greed.

Beyond my gender, as a White woman no other means of erasure remained; society’s disregard for its elders would find me, if I lived to old age, but for the moment I had outlasted familiar means of objectification, diminishment, or discrimination. I was no longer poor, I was able-bodied, and every intimate who ever refused to acknowledge my value wa

I am on record in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to engage safely with the other side. But seeking to understand dangerous behaviors and beliefs is quite different from permitting them.

But even if your ideas are superior, I am asking you to consider that you did not arrive at them because of your innate superiority. Depending on your level of social privilege, you arrived at them because of your life experiences, your information sources, your community influences.

What if our systems failed the media consumers who are, for myriad reasons, easily taken by political lies?

In fact, we are a nation of essentially similar people shaped by vastly different circumstances of place, wealth, education, and culture. Those best able to document our socioeconomic divide with humility and accuracy typically have occupied more than one class, remain connected to the one they left, and attribute any upward mobility to good fortun

Mobility is a virtue of freedom. Staying—or returning—is an equal virtue.

I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling White Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.