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"I am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle class, despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am white, but I grew up in an inner-city housing project where most everyone was black or Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of privileges that were denied my neighbors but that most Americans take for granted. In fact, my childhood was like a social science experiment: Find out what being middle class really means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a socalled bad neighborhood. Define whiteness by putting a lightskinned kid in the midst of a community of color. If the exception proves the rule, I’m that exception.
Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe them and they will likely put black or African American at the top of the list. Ask someone of European descent the same question and white will be far down the list, if it’s there at all. Not so for me. I’ve studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar, its parts of speech; I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought. There’s an old saying that you never really know your own language until you study another. It’s the same with race and class.
In fact, race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality . . . . One of [my mother’s favorite stories] was how I had wanted a baby sister so badly that I kidnapped a black child in the playground of the housing complex. She told this story each time my real sister, Alexandra, and I were standing, arms crossed, facing away from each other after some squabble or fistfight. The moral of the story for my mother was that I should love my sister, since I had wanted to have her so desperately. The message I took away, however, was one of race. I was fascinated that I could have been oblivious to something that years later feels so natural, so innate as race does."
He begins to compare how the perception of race is different for those who were raised in classes that did not have people of "races" other than his own, with those who were raised in places with people of different "races".
Explanation:
In his text, Donley begins to argue about how the perception of race and the concepts one has about it are different from the environment in which an individual was raised and from the people with whom that individual has contact. In addition, it shows how this perception influences people's thinking about what it means to belong to each race and this meaning defines a standard, a stereotype related to citizens, the place where they live and the people around them.
Donley does this, through a series of comparisons and juxtapositions whose main objective is to show the reader a certain duality by reasoning in this matter in a profound way. This is seen in the excerpt:
"In fact, my childhood was like a social science experiment: Find out what being middle class really means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a socalled bad neighborhood. Defines whiteness by putting a lightskinned kid in the midst of a community of color. If the exception provides the rule, I'm that exception. "
