CHAPTER 1: Punk Rock Pedagogy and Transcending Invisible Borders: Dismantling Power, Privilege, and White Supremacy in an Online Environment

Thomas Wolfe says you can never go home again, but I wonder if one can ever truly leave. The harder I try to step away or distance myself from my past, the louder I find myself knocking on my door. Or perhaps it is simply my teenage self, banging from within to stay alive.

I was raised by middle class parents in a working class town. Economic despair was ever-present, although diversity would not move in until later. About a mile from my childhood home was a pre-World War II supposed temporary housing development called Nor-Wayne—or “Shack Town” as only residents can deem it—the same neighborhood described in the novel The Dollmaker (Arnow, 1954). Originally made up of Appalachian immigrants, the neighborhood of wooden duplexes, tri- and quadrupleplexes, situated on twisty courts became permanent fixtures in ever states of disrepair.