When I Choose Privilege

By Izzy McMahon

Writing 212: The Art of the Essay

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I decided to wear the dress my dad bought me from an Ann Taylor factory outlet in Naples, Florida. Black with white pinstripes, I paired it with a blazer that cinched at my waist to carve a feminine figure. I wore my most appropriate heels: two-inch black suede with a strap carefully resting across the ankle. Sheer stockings, lip gloss, and curled hair pinned back with a bobby pin. Presentation was everything. When my name was called by that starchy voice, I tried to look practiced at walking in heels. Heel-toe, heel-toe, I repeated in my head. Crossing the front of the room, I approached the first of a row of wooden benches, each bench warped uniquely by the burden of time and weight. With feigned poise, I sat in the pew and smoothed out my dress to cover my exposed knee. A man sat down to my left. Painter’s jeans, T-shirt, and muddy work boots. Side by side, we waited patiently.

***

I got my first job when I was sixteen years old. I was bored, looking for some spending money, and hoping to capitalize on the teenage opportunity to finally enter the American workforce. After a few hours scrolling through positions online, I settled on applying for a cashier position at Chopt Salad. Situated off a meandering parkway in monotonous suburbia, Chopt attracted almost as many customers as the Purre Barre next door. With a pathetically short resumé in hand, I waltzed through Chopt’s doors with the intention of interviewing for a job. I asked the first employee I saw if I could please speak with the manager. He said he’d check the back office for a man named Alex.

I got hired that first day. Alex chuckled when I handed him my resumé along with a firm handshake; he told me that if I wanted the job, I would just have to sign a few forms and be ready for orientation. I beamed. After handing me a staff T-shirt and hat, we walked to the kitchen. He introduced me to some of the employees. Roy, about six feet tall, with long curly hair slicked back with gel—he went to the local college. Mario, heavier set, bald, about forty or fifty—he smiled at me with a closed-lip grin. During my short orientation, the rest of the staff filed into the kitchen to meet me, all of us in our matching T-shirts and hats — mine new, with the smell of factory processing still stuck to its fabric, theirs aged by cycles in the washing machine. Although varied in age and demeanor, it didn’t take me long to notice the staff was made up entirely of the small percentage of Hispanic members of my community. And I, a white girl, representing the majority of my white-washed suburbia.

***

It was Thursday, November 8th. I should have been in class, but I was in a courthouse in Surry County, North Carolina. Me, in my best clothes, sitting on that bench with four of my fellow undergraduate, blazer-clad friends. Quietly, we sat facing an American Seal hanging at the front of the room, detailed in bronze. Sitting with us was my mother, a retired lawyer, who had driven down from D.C. the previous night for this occasion. She had a legal pad positioned carefully on her lap along with her favorite pen—black, extra-fine—in hand. Purposeful and sharp. She pinched my lower back, reminding me to sit up straight. Waiting in that exhausted courtroom with fading green carpet, I could feel my heart beating—melting behind my sternum and collecting in a puddle at the bottom of my stomach. My heart’s fierce pound reverberated in my chest and escaped through my fingertips. I hoped no one could hear its anxious beat.

The man next to me tapped his foot, fiddling with a box of cigarettes he had pulled out of his jeans. Behind us, a woman paced the back of the room trying to settle a crying baby with a quiet melody. She was wearing jeans, flip-flops, and a sweatshirt. Nervous energy charged the air with agitation. Confusion crowded the benches like a low fog. Leaning over, my mom whispered to me and my friends that we had nothing to worry about, that she had tried misdemeanor cases like ours a thousand times. As my friends and I huddled around her, she went over the court proceedings we could expect and explained how we should respond to the judge. The woman behind us leaned forward, grasping to hear. She didn’t have any legal counsel, or even a friend by her side. The judge walked into the room and we rose to our feet.

***

On that first day, I realized that the staff at Chopt did not simply coexist amicably during working hours as I had expected. Instead, the group was a close-knit unit of friends. Each had been working at Chopt for multiple years, year-round. Most planned on working there for many years longer; I only intended to stay until the summer began to wane, when I would depart for college. But I kept this to myself. The staff’s internal friendship gave rise to a casual culture that existed between the staffers — one that celebrated teasing and included a staff group chat. At the end of each day, most everyone in the staff would pile into an old, red Jetta sedan and head off together—more people than seatbelts, Latin American music pouring out and trailing behind like a stream of exhaust. I would part ways in the parking lot with a wave.

During my first few weeks, I was the odd man out of the Chopt staff. I would stand toward the edges of the room, demurely taking up space. I didn’t know how to mop. Instead of asking, I spent weeks sweeping up escaped salad that stuck to the floor like suction cups with a frayed broom. I fumbled through a day’s work that was mindless routine for everyone around me. But whenever I looked confused, someone would swoop in to save me with a smile. Mario showed me where the extra pitchers were stored in the kitchen to make refilling the water containers easier. Roy asked me if I spoke Spanish, and I told him I had taken a few years in high school. He asked if I’d want to speak in Spanish with him, so I could practice. And so we did. I learned that Anna, the other cashier, went to the same middle school as me during overlapping years, but we had never known each other. She told me about her favorite teachers. Slowly, I learned the inner brain of Chopt Salad, and even more slowly, I became a part of it.

***

Peeling his reading glasses off his shirt, the court officer announced the next case. The court room fell silent. I turned my head, looking at the pews behind me, and saw a man rise with hesitation and approach the bench. He was wearing ripped-up acid wash jeans and a long-sleeve black t-shirt with a band logo. His hands shook by his side, wiping sweaty palms on his jeans. The judge read his case with boredom; he faced a charge of reckless driving, a misdemeanor in North Carolina. Without looking up from his page, the judge asked if the man would like to represent himself, or if he would like a state appointed attorney. The young man’s face froze in confusion. “How do I get a lawyer?” he asked. The judge responded that the state would provide him one, but he would have to pay—his case was too minor for the state to hire a lawyer without repayment. The man said he could not afford that and chose to represent himself. He pled guilty. The gavel dropped, and the court officer announced the next case.

I felt my mom tighten beside me. Filled with conviction, she leaned toward my side and told me that the young man was innocent. There was no case against him, she said, speaking out of years of experience: “The judge knew he would plead guilty. He was scared and didn’t know what to say, so the court knew they could get away with it.” I watched as the man filed out of the room, head buried to the floor. He would wear this record for the rest of his life. And he most likely was innocent.

***

There was a dichotomy that existed within Chopt, separated by the hinges of a swinging kitchen door. The “front of the house” existed at the will of the customer. Smiles were a part of our uniform and thank-yous were complimentary. We chopped salads in quiet uniformity, mechanically fulfilling the rules outlined in our employee handbook. In “the front of the house,” the customer was always right. But in “the back of the house,” in our kitchen, our customers were obnoxious, know-it-alls. In “the back of the house,” we complained about customers from the nearby all-girls private high school in their plaid uniforms; I never mentioned I went to that high school. In “the back of the house,” we could groan about the endless stream of phone-clad “please hurry, I’m in a rush” customers, sit on the counters to check our phones, or scavenge for a snack in the walk-in freezer. Here, in between the rushes of hungry customers, I was invited to after-work dinner with the staff for this first time. I took my car, they took the red Jetta.

On slow days, we would sneak avocados from the salad line to make guacamole in the back. I remember the first time I encountered this, my manager warned me that the guacamole was too spicy, and that “no gringas” could handle it. Brazenly, I challenged him with a smirk. I grabbed a chip and plunged it into a mass of jalapeños, masked by a few meager avocados. I remember the slow heat building on my tongue, Hades’ breath caught in my throat. I swallowed quickly. “That’s not too spicy,” I retorted, shoveling another cautiously impressive mouthful before stepping back to my post at the cash register. When the next man in line approached the cash register, he looked at me with veiled concern. I was relieved when he pocketed his change without asking why I was teary-eyed.

***

Getting up from our bench, my mother snuck her way to the table where two state lawyers sat, crouching by their side. Together, they whispered and laughed, and she pointed toward me and my friends waiting on the bench. After a few minutes of rapport, my mom strolled back to our bench with an aura of self-assurance. I didn’t realize that heels could click on carpet, but when she walked, they did. My mother had moved our case to the front of the docket, advancing past the dozens of others waiting in the courtroom. We would be tried as a group, instead of individually. I was relieved to hear this. She always had a knack of getting her way, playing the part. With only a Bar Association certification from New York from 1980, she acted like a lawyer in that North Carolina courtroom. She held a unique agency over our proceeding. We weren’t the only ones to notice.

The court official announced our case next. We approached the bench, swore on the Bible to tell the truth, and stood in a line before the judge. My mother stood a few feet behind, just beyond a waist-height dividing wall between those receiving the scales of justice and an audience of onlookers. She leaned over the wall, assuring us not to be nervous. It was against the rules to speak to us during trial, but no one seemed to mind. The judge read our charges. We looked at him with heavy eyes. I felt the guilt rising in my chest, sticky like molasses. “So girls, I hear you go to Wake Forest University,” the judge began. “Great school. It’s my alma mater.” I didn’t know what to respond. Are you supposed to make small talk with a judge? I turned to my mom; she gave me a smile. After pleasantries, we continued the proceeding. Everything we uttered was coached by my mother, who carefully puppeteered from the sideline. The judge let us off easy. Behind me, I could feel the anger simmering in the crowd. Maybe more than anger was longing, I couldn’t tell.

***

There are moments where I try to hide my privilege—privilege reaped from money, genetics, race, and physical ability I was born into—and there are other moments where I capitalize on it. Moments where I cash in my privilege like it’s redeemable American currency. And in many ways, it is. Sitting in that courtroom, I was treated differently from everyone around me. I looked different, I was from a different background, a different socioeconomic status — and you could tell from the moment I walked in the door. The judge smiled at me, the lawyers joked with my mom. And, in the end, my punishment was kind. After the trial, my mother and I walked straight up to the clerk to pay for expungement. My teenage mistake won’t follow me around, wouldn’t cause me worry about future employment, or future run-ins with the law. I have the privilege of a criminal justice system that works in my benefit. And I tapped into that advantage on November 8th.

At Chopt, I hid my privilege. I viewed it as something that separated me from the rest of the staff. I wouldn’t ever bring up my private school education. Nor would I mention that my extended time off was a family vacation to Europe. During my shifts at Chopt, I chose to pocket my privilege so it wouldn’t be a divisive tool, something which I believed would distance me from my fellow employees. Most do not have that ability — the ability to pick and choose when to exercise or hide privilege. Perhaps, that too is privilege I exercise.

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A Word from Izzy 

Even in a predominantly white university, privilege is a topic seldom mentioned. Discussions surrounding privilege are often evaded or met with backlash. No matter the reasoning behind this shyness toward or denial of privilege, I want to open the discussion. As a white, upper-class, physically able, heterosexual female, I have benefited from my positionality my whole life. In this piece, I challenged myself to grapple with this privilege head-on, perhaps calling others to do the same. To do so, I chose to focus on my brief entanglement in the legal system — a system which often tends to favor wealthy, white individuals. 

I chose to write about my day in the courtroom to expose the disparity between my experience and those who were less privileged. Throughout the piece, I highlighted the differences between my clothing and those around me — a subtle indicator of status to those overseeing the court proceedings. Clothing therefore served as a lens to examine our varying levels of privilege. In this scene, I reap the benefits of my status and receive modest punishment for my transgressions. Most around me don’t experience the same. 

 However, after writing the court scene, my piece felt incomplete. I felt as if there was another layer to my experience that I had not yet given voice. Although there have been many occasions where I have capitalized on my privilege (both knowingly and unknowingly), there have also been moments in my life where I felt I should hide my privilege from others. I chose to explore this inner conflict by interweaving my experience working at Chopt throughout the court scene. By doing this, I hoped to share with readers my complicated relationship with my own privilege — but also, expose my power as a privileged individual to wield or hide privilege as I see fit. By intertwining these two narratives, I endeavored to provide a thoughtful consideration of the role of privilege in my life. I challenge you to do the same.

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From Professor Marianne Erhardt