So now YOU are a racist.
You are judging me based on the color of my skin and no other criteria.
I even warned you that you were about to step into that hole and you did anyway.
So if I told you that I am actually Black, would that make me right and you wrong?
Let’s talk about my experience and we can judge if this White boy has any reason to know what he is talking about. Being judges for who I am and not the color of my skin would be a nice change in a topic on racism ...
I lived the first ten years of my life in middle class suburbia. I was raised atheist and attended Church twice a year as a social obligation. I rejected the fairy tale Jesus of the Methodist and Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) when I was about 8 and my best friend in school was sexually assaulted by his mother’s drunk boyfriend (any ‘god’ that indifferent to evil or unable to deal with it was not worth wasting time on).
Then my father abandoned his family to play house with his boss’s wife and I moved to the “wrong side of the tracks”. My mother worked three jobs to pay for a place to live and “food stamps” provided food for the table.
When I got tired of getting beat up at school, I joined one of the two local gangs and participated in burglaries and arson. Later when I was old enough to drive, I smuggled drugs across state lines. I know what it feels like to be in a knife fight and I know what it feels like to shoot someone and I know what it is like to set someone on fire and have to live with it.
By 16 I had graduated from atheism to full blown nihilism (look it up if you are are unfamiliar) and by 17 I was facing a future of death by cop or life in prison before my 21st birthday. I was the oldest of three brothers and my youngest brother was murdered and my middle brother shot himself in the head. I am the last surviving sibling and the last surviving member of the old gang that I grew up with.
Had God not intervened, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today.
I had to work two jobs to support myself and pay for college, but I graduated with a 5 year Bachelor of Architecture degree in only 10 years.
I have a small home (1400 sf) and a wife and daughter. I teach at a Pentecostal Church with about a 60% African American congregation (including the pastor).
So what do you think, did my ‘white privileged’ protect me from life?
Do I have no idea what life is like for a black man in America?