What is Micah White's family background?
Micah White was born in 1982 to a mixed-race household in Ohio: an African-American father who worked blue-collar jobs and a white mother of German-Irish descent who took on most of the child-rearing after the marriage fell apart. Money was scarce, faith abundant. His mother homeschooled him for stretches, steeping him in evangelical Christianity while encouraging voracious reading; his father’s periodic absence acquainted him early with America’s racial and class fault lines. The result is a thinker forged by contradiction: black and white, church and rebellion, rural poverty and elite education. Those tensions later surfaced in his activism, from writing letters to the local newspaper at 13 to co-conspiring on Occupy Wall Street. White’s family story is less pedigree than crucible, showing how marginal roots can nurture global imagination. How has your own personal mix of privilege and precarity sharpened or dulled your appetite for radical change?