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In reply to the discussion: White DUers: Tell Your Stories [View all]kwassa
(23,340 posts)in high school by a black student. He threw an ice ball into my face, which precipitated a fight between us. It was a ludicrous fight because we ended up wrestling and punching each other in about a foot of powder snow while we wore heavy parkas and gloves. I got a bloody nose; blood shows up well in snow. We were both suspended from school for three days.
Context is important. This was the winter after MLK was assassinated, and for part of that time there were race-based attacks in my high school. It seemed quite surreal, as this was a liberal college town, Oberlin, the first college to admit blacks and women in the country. There were a sizable black community in the town as it had been a station on the Underground Railroad, and there was a pretty good relationship between blacks and whites. There was no segregation in the schools. These racial attacks came out of a frustration with the status quo, I think, and the loss of MLK.
I felt more of a sense of being an outsider when I lived in West Hartford, Connecticut, and most of my school was Jewish, and I wasn't. I didn't feel discriminated against, though.
Now, I am married to a black woman, and have a daughter. I experience racial slights through the experiences of my wife, and what she relates to me about them. I experience racial slights through different expectations from my daughter's teachers than they have of the white students.
I am sometimes, unlike most white people I know, in completely, or near-completely black social situations, and have always been treated very well, including massive family reunions where I am simply treated like family.
We live in a wildly diverse area though, full of immigrants from around the world, of all colors. I think this will ultimately trump the black-white racial polarity in the United States, the increasing changes of race and diversity of our country.