I grew up in a trailer park in Appalachia.  I don’t live there anymore.  For that, some have called me lucky.  For a long time, I believed them.  How else does it happen?  It’s certainly not hard work alone.  Most people in trailer parks all over Appalachia work hard.  Most escape the perils of drug addiction and unemployment, but many still don’t escape the trailer park and under-paid jobs.  Sure, community colleges and state schools offer a way out of poverty; it’s not quite the same as hitting the lottery, but it isn’t easy.  You have to study and pay your student loans.  No one shows you how it’s supposed to be done when you’re a first generation college student and you don’t know anyone in your extended family who’s graduated from a four-year college.  You’ll have to make it up as you go.  To make it through all that, I can understand why some consider me lucky.

It’s good to be lucky, but no one likes to have their experiences chalked up to luck.  It seems like it takes all the personal achievement out of it.  Surely, all those hours in the library counted for something.  Dissertations don’t write themselves after all.  So it always felt like kind of an insult when I was told I was lucky. “You didn’t do that.  You couldn’t have done that.  You’re just lucky.”

After I finished graduate school, I got a tenure-track job, which for anyone in the humanities is like hitting the lottery.  Hard work alone won’t get you that for sure.  By my mid-thirties, I was beginning to think it was luck too.  Then one evening I was out talking to the neighbor across the street about buying our house.  I told her that we were lucky to find it when we did.  Without pausing, she said, “You’re not lucky.  You’re blessed.”  It hit me.  I was blessed.  Luck had nothing to do with it.  How blind of me not to see the master’s hand.  I was tempted, when I got my tenure-track position, to believe in Providence, to think that some greater plan had led me to this point.  In a moment, I was convinced of it.  I was blessed to come this far from that trailer park in Northeast Appalachia.  How else could it have happened?  I may not have done it alone, but it certainly wasn’t just dumb luck.  From that day, I began looking at my life as something more than a series of accidents.  I had some role to play in it, but I also needed a higher power to bring it all together.  This sparked a sense of gratitude in me, which was a good feeling.  I was humbled by being blessed, not humiliated by being lucky.

That lasted for a good while, but then I started to think about my family still back in the trailer park.  Were they not blessed?  Had Providence cursed them to backbreaking jobs at low pay?  Was I inherently better than them because God rewarded me with a good job and a nice house?  Being blessed sounded nice, but it rang hollow when I’d use it as a response to accusations of being lucky.  I could hear it through my family’s ears, “I’m blessed, but you’re not.”  That’s no less insulting than being told you’re lucky.  Saying “I’m blessed, but you’re not” is just another way of saying “you’re cursed.”  Eventually, I got to the point that I could no longer say it or claim it even quietly to myself.

If not lucky nor blessed, then what?  I began to suspect that I was merely privileged.  I had not typically thought of myself as privileged, most folks who spend half their lives in trailer parks tend not to.  But even if we are lucky or blessed, aren’t we privileged to be so?  Surely it’s not so easy to earn God’s blessing.  Does simply being good and hard-working win the favor of Providence?  It probably doesn’t hurt, but I knew too many good, hard-working people who did not seem to have the favor of Providence for me to believe that.  Privilege had an argument.  An especially good argument when I began to consider I was a white man born in 20^th century America.  Perhaps all those obstacles I had overcome were merely doors being opened for me.  Sure, I still swallowed my ‘t’s  when I spoke (La-in, for Latin), but otherwise few suspected I was trailer trash.  The entire time I had been a white man with all that came with it. 

Unlike being lucky or blessed, it’s hard to shake the title of privileged.  It’s not the gift of God like being blessed, and it sits a little heavier on the shoulders than being called lucky.  The journey from trailer trash to tenured seems like a bit of a let down when it only leads to the realization that you were privileged all the way.  Part of me doesn’t like it one bit, but I can’t seem to reckon it any other way.  Whether we receive luck, blessings, or privilege, I imagine it comes down to how you use it.  There’s a lot more for me to consider regarding privilege, particularly the white male version of it.  Certainly more than I can make out here.  For now I’ll just say I am privileged to be an Appalachian.