I hate Twitter threads and really wish people would turn them into blog posts instead, and I’m never gonna stop saying that, but this thread by Corinne McConnaughy speaks to my experience in powerful ways. I’ve said all this before, but let me put it succinctly: There is no question that being white was enormously important in my social rise — but there is also no question that I had a long and not always easy climb. A black man who, like me, was raised largely by his grandmother because his mother worked long hours to make ends meet while his father was in prison, and who, when his father returned home, spent years dodging the old man’s drunken rages, and who could only go to college because he paid his own way – well, it’s almost unimaginable, especially in the South in the 1970s. There can’t have been more than a handful of black people of my place and time who did what I did. But that doesn’t mean it was a picnic for me, and nothing tries my patience more than being lectured about my white privilege by people whose way was paved by well-off and well-educated parents.