A brief follow-up to my 7/31 posting “Of money, class, and prejudice”, where I told a story about an acquaintance, Johnny, from early in my life, who was blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections, and turned out to be, unsuspectedly, a reflexive anti-Semite, revealing himself while he was dissing me and my family (“they might as well be Jews”). My friend Bill (from summer camp in childhood, then from Princeton, and then from the summer of 1961, when I stayed in his family’s house) served as a kind of counterbalance in this tale, as someone blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections who has been a good friend to me and also has devoted a big slice of his life working doggedly against poverty, urban decline, and racial injustice, just because he thinks these things need fixing and he can do something to help).
At this point there’s a posting to be written on the nature of friendship, involving as it does a recognition, on both sides, of significant disparities between the two of you, which each of you then respect by working around them with as little comment as possible (adjustments often made without conscious reflection), in exchange for enjoying the good qualities the other person brings to the relationship.
In e-mail Bill and I have been looking at these disparities, at how we dealt with them long ago and how we come at them now. Back then, he was somewhat uncomfortable with his position of privilege, family money, and social connection, but is now untroubled by these things, understanding that, as I said to him:
in large part, these are things that just come to you, and the question is what you’ll do with them
and that he had in fact put these advantages to good use throughout his life. Indeed, one of our first exchanges had to be cut short because he was off to demonstrate in the local Good Trouble National Day of Action (honoring John Lewis) — at the age of 85 (Bill is 6 months older than I am, and obviously vigorous in a way I am not).
And then I riffed some on advantages:
privilege, family money, and social connections, along with other advantages on this (seriously incomplete) list (some of them guy-specific):
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