Who I am

I am white! I will go to bed tonight white and will wake up tomorrow still white. I don’t feel guilty or expect to apologize for being white. There are others born ‘non-white’ and will go to bed and wake up ‘non-white’: I don’t feel I have to apologize or feel guilty for them or others, no matter their color, station or ethnicity and I don’t expect others to apologize for me. It’s time to get over it.
My parents divorced when I was 5 and I lived with my mother and an extended family of aunts and uncles through high school. We spent time in a migrant camp where we hoed and picked hops. So much for white privilege.  When WWII started the men of the extended family went off to fight in foreign lands. While living in a housing project, many of the women went to work in ship yards and airplane factories and two remained at home to look after the children. We stayed and played outside until dark and looked after each other.  After the war, jobs were lost and time was spent on welfare and whatever menial jobs that were available.
I’ve hoed and picked strawberries, pitched silage and cleaned out a dairy barn with 50+ milk cows. worked many other jobs in grade and high school, accepting the wage offered, without complaining, just thankful for the job, never thinking I deserved a better job. After high school I worked in a sawmill as a ‘tail man’ on a ‘tongue/groove’ planer and ‘lead man’ on a ‘bull’ planer to earn tuition money for my first year in college.
It took me 6 yrs to get a BSEE, working various jobs to pay for tuition and books. Jobs included lab testing viscosity of glue compounds at a Monsanto facility in Seattle. Summer jobs at Boeing Renton and Plant 2, ‘bucking’ and driving rivets on KC97s and early B52s.  One summer working in ‘Preliminary Design’ on a project ‘WS110’ hand calculating large data spread sheets, collecting data during low speed wind tunnel testing.  WS110 was to be a very high-altitude vehicle that could ‘skip’ on the higher atmosphere.  I think it was a study that later became the ‘dinosaur’ project.
My last 3 years in college I worked full time as a Engineering Aide in the Boeing Flight Test group at Boeing Field.  During the school year the work was either swing shift or graveyard, whichever matched my school schedule best; summer was day shift.  Boeing was very accommodating for engineering students.