'When photos of Ellie Kemper at the Veiled Prophet Ball resurfaced this week, I felt a shock of recognition — and shame.' claire_lampen writes
Ellie Kemper at the Veiled Prophet Ball in 1999. Photo: Jamie Rector/St Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris When the Veiled Prophet Ball became a nationally known quantity on Monday, the prevailing reaction was the reasonable one: shock and confusion.
Classism is a crucial component of this story, but I also wonder about shame. I wonder if that is something Kemper feels, in hindsight, not because I believe her to be racist for walking in a deb ball, but because I believe racism buoyed the systems of white privilege in which we grew up. When I think about my own attendance at VP, shame is the emotion that swells to the surface.
According to a St. Louis trope I have heard repeated since forever, the first thing two strangers often ask each other upon learning they both grew up there is: “Where’d you go to high school?” Realistically, this is probably a question only rich people ask each other, and when I hear it now, it reads as a subtle inquest into a new acquaintance’s place in the socioeconomic order.
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