I grew up in what could be called the California Appalachians. My town’s population was around a thousand, with a median household income of $37,000. The local public school consisted of a series of air-conditioned, double-wide trailers that served as classrooms for combined grades (first and second in one, third and fourth in another, and so on). The only permanent building was the administrative office.

The town had multiple saloons and churches, and a movie theater that doubled as the performance space for Christmas plays. There was one doctor, with an office and an x-ray machine. Main Street was two blocks long, with false fronts on every building, a train platform with one Amtrak departure per day, a community pool, and an active Lions Club that put on parades.

What had once been the main industries, mining and lumbering, had dissipated by the time my family arrived, and most of the populace seemed to be employed in some type of government or service sector job, owned a small business, or lived a subsistence life off of arts and crafts sold to holiday seekers heading further up the mountain to ski. A few gold prospectors still worked the river, but they didn’t appear to have much luck.

In this community, a shaved head was not a fashion statement, but a telltale sign of a louse infestation: only more affluent families could afford both the medicated shampoo and the spare time to comb all the nits out. While a girl with pretty locks might have been worth the effort, no one thought to waste such resources on a boy from a poorer home.

The official statistics claimed the town was over 90 percent white, but even that seemed low: other than a couple kids in the upper grades and a couple you might see down by the river or at the pool, knowing any child who was not identifiably white (or Christian, or even a native English speaker) was rare.

Even so, it would be hard to argue that life was set up in favor of all the children living there. Alcoholism was rampant, and so was food insecurity. Kids — well aware that playing by the rules was unlikely to get them fed any quicker — were already stealing food by the first grade.

Poorer children might eat at the homes of their better-off friends, but no one seemed to think much about the parents’ hunger. Perhaps they were blamed for their predicament — for not having finished high school, for not being able to find work, or for blowing the family’s cash at the saloon.

Mine was the kind of town that a classless identity politics forgets. The kind of town where being male or white or Christian wasn’t synonymous with having decent housing, proper medical care, or a steady job.