Pierre W. Orelus

Living in the Shadows Pierre W. Orelus

Using auto-ethnography as a methodological framework, this book captures two diametrical poles of the author's experiences growing up poor and being educated in a colonial school system in a developing country and currently working as a university professor in the United States. The author begins by recollecting his mixed childhood and adolescence experiences, including being subjected to abject poverty, escaping a sexual predator as a teenager, witnessing class, gender, and sexual inequities, while at the same time being supported by family, neighbours, and friends in his community. Next, the author talks about the social class privileges that he has enjoyed as a result of becoming a university professor while juxtaposing such privileges to micro-aggression, systemic racism, xenophobia, linguicism, and elitism that he has been facing in society, including in the Ivy Halls of White America.