Can a straight, white male liberal ever truly suffer at the hands of our culture?

[hifiguy]

49. Given certain conditions, yes indeed

Last edited Thu Nov 13, 2014, 07:02 PM - Edit history (1)

and I am walking, talking proof.

I am a middle-aged straight, white, liberal (democratic socialist, actually) male. Though I dropped out of high school at 16, in my mid-20s I enrolled at, and graduated with all the honors I could win from, my excellent midwestern state university and went on to a well-known Ivy League law school where the FLOTUS and I were in the same graduating class. No shit.

I have never been able to get and hold on to any job even remotely commensurate with my intelligence and education and lost my home on May 1. I have since been living in "emergency housing." I have never had any significant medical problems. I have never been arrested, in prison/jail, had any form of addiction, or any mental illness other than depression issues that have been situational in nature - caused by my particular circumstances at the time - that have (edited to delete "not&quot - that HAVE been easily and minimally medicated.

Why? Two reasons.

The biggest one is that I am Asperger's - dx'd by both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2005. As such I am fiercely introverted and very solitary. At every real job at which I have ever worked my work itself has been praised to the skies and I have always been let go ASAP. I am polite and professional but nearly asocial. I do not do eye contact, make small talk and just want to be left alone to do my job, which I can do very well, as the two judges I clerked for can attest to. As a therapist once told me "you're just enough off to raise most people's red flags, but only subconsciously." I don't wear well with people as I am socially awkward and, as that therapist put it "spooky" to neurotypical people. As one of the judges I clerked for put it I have "a remarkable ability to make most people feel uncomfortable" around me, without trying. People want to hire and work around others like themselves. I am assuredly not like very many others.

Secondly, class issues in many professions are enormous. Law firms are, in the long run, far more interested in who you and your parents know and are connected to than where you went to school. My best friend in law-school was a very upper-class African-American - private elementary schools, Beverly Hills High School, spoke four languages fluently, movie-star handsome, whose family had deep connections in real-estate development and the movie industry. He told me that I would have a far harder life post-law school than he was because I was born working-class - NOT middle class or upper-middle class - WORKING CLASS. He told me that "they (the decision makers in the professional world) look at me and know that even though I am a black man, I am one of them. We share a background that has nothing to do with what schools we went to. They know within five seconds you are NOT one of them and never will be." While my Asperger nature was a big factor in my winding up living the life I have the fact that I was one of the "have-nots" (who just happens to be ridiculously smart) played nearly as large a role in my failure at building a successful life.

I have seen working-class people ascend to high professional ranks but they are few and far between and are without exception highly extroverted individuals with top-level people/interaction skills. I have been told that it is easier to scale the heights in medicine and certain scientific disciplines, where ability trumps everything, but the law is an intensely social procession in which you have to aggressively sell yourself, which I cannot do. I fit into that world like a mermaid in a chorus line.

It's not easy, but even a well-educated straight white liberal male can wind up on the bottom of society.