I Don’t Understand My Black Middle Class Friends

A more personal take on how my experience with poverty makes me an outsider to those who are Black and of relative means

“Outside Looking In” cartoon (cropped), April 22, 2010. (Jack Ohman, The Oregonian).

Since my eleventh birthday in 1980, poverty has been one of the defining features of my life. Between 1988 and 1999, I would go through three periods of significant unemployment, a…