In my last reflection, I mentioned the intersection of race, gender expression, and neurodiversity in my family story—qualities that all have spectra embedded in them. I didn’t touch on culture and class, which are also observable as existing on spectra.
I was shaped by aspects of Black domestic and expressive culture, but completely isolated from Black community. Likewise German immigrant culture, separated from an immigrant community that nurtured those specific traditional values. From this perspective, I’m able to observe in myself the interplay between race and ethnicity only from the margins of those spaces and states, not from the center. Blackness and whiteness are not fixed values; nor are Germanness and culturally displaced Africanness.
The family story, just in the 20th century—the people I shared a home with—starts on both sides with humble beginnings, and moves through privilege gained through luck and ingenuity. That privilege was not culturally embedded in our family—like our connection to ethnic culture and racial position relative to the dominant culture, it was only adjacent to the culture of American royalty—families who had known privilege for generations. My family was less like the Rockefellers and more like the Beverly Hillbillies with a multi-ethnic cast.
The arc of my family’s material wealth is remarkably graceful—a slow, upward curve, starting in the early part of the century, that reaches well above the median, into 10% territory, flattens in the 50s and 60s, and then draws slowly down to the bottom again in the present day. Through various circumstances and choices, the anchors that make generational transfer possible simply did not survive.
This is just a thumbnail sketch of the part of the family I was embedded within. It doesn’t take into account the Swedish immigrants and consistently lower-middle-class whites descended from earlier waves of European immigration who never accumulated anything like transferable access to the American dream. Generations of people on both sides living in the moment, poverty and privilege passing through them, neither pole of the spectrum inhabited for long.