I empathize with you because I did exactly the same thing you did, except that the black kid was a good friend of mine and I was showing off in front of my other friends. I’ve felt bad about it for the last 40 years, and have often wondered about the friend I hurt. He never talked to me again, and that hurt worse than anything.

Jeff

Jeff

Take some solace that the AP just declared NC for Obama. The world is changing.

Lara Amber

It strikes me that the corner with Louis Banks was one of the moments in your life when you became self-aware. And as a result, you took responsibility for your life regarding the racism you’d been fed up to that point – and you rejected it.

Unlike a number of other commentors here, I’m not going to say you were, or are, being too hard on yourself. Because being so hard on yourself over this event in your life is part of what made you who you are now – you’ve transmuted humiliation into a source of amazing strength, a strength you’ve relied on probably since a few years after it happened.

In my experience, everyone who has become truly self-aware has had moments in their life that were as humiliating to them as what you described was to you. Moments when they think to themselves “Oh my gods, what have I done…” and, upon reflection, “I’ll never do that again, or let anyone around me do that either.” Those moments become as integral to who we are as a first kiss, first car, first speeding ticket, loss of virginity, birth of a child, death of a first pet, and so on.

On a more personal, less clinical note, racism and bigotry in general are like I’ve heard alcoholism is – you never fully recover, and only through constant vigilance can you ever be sure that you’re not falling back into old habits. In that vein:

Hello, everyone. I’m Brian Angliss, and I’m a racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist, classist bigot (recovering).

I can’t say for sure what people are thinking, but it’s possible that the blacks who aren’t returning your greetings have been conditioned to know their place, even at this late date. Once upon a time a black dare not meet the gaze of a white, and if you’re black in NC … well, Jesse Motherfucking Helms hasn’t been dead for long.

So keep doing your part. Keep being cordial and open. It’s not a battle that will be won with a single exchange, but you can keep doing your part and trusting that we’ll get there in time.

Now that I live in North Carolina, I find myself in a weird position.

I occasionally have to drive through a black neighborhood and I have always had a habit of making eye contact with people who walk along the road and look my way. I can’t tell you how many times that I have made eye contact with a black person and raised my hand to acknowledge them only to be glared at or ignored.

When this happens I find myself wondering if it is even worth trying to show a gesture of acknowledgment. It appears to me that there is an attitude in this area that only whites can be racist and if a black acts bigoted towards a white, it is justified in some manner.

I hate what blacks endured in the past, as well as the Native Americans, the Jews, the Chinese and other races that suffered oppression, but how do we move forward when one is met with hostility or indifference when they try to be cordial? It is hard to know how react when you feel like you are held in contempt for being white.

I hope that real healing can happen, but it is going to have to happen is both directions.

Obama’s election was a step forward, but it is going to take all of us to keep the momentum going.

I have done a lot of work for Obama’s campaign. It started about a year ago when I went to his campaign headquarters in Colorado soon after it opened to volunteer and brought my daughter with me. I went door-to-door in the dead of winter to gather up people in my precinct for the state’s caucus. I was the precinct captain and was nominated by my neighbors to run the caucus for my precinct and then as a state delegate. I traveled down to Colorado Springs for the state convention where they nominated those all-important national delegates. And that was just for the primaries.

I remember the day my dad sat us kids down and told us he was racist. He said we were old enough to know and that he was protecting us by not saying so sooner.

I remember the dark ride home in the pickup truck with my brother where my dad told us that an anonymous note was left at his office. It said that my sister was dating a nigger and he asked us if that was true and told us not to lie to him. I remember his anger and intensity. I remember his threats of hitting that kid with a shovel. We lied to him.

I remember last summer when we were walking through the park and a couple of Hispanics were riding their bikes. “There are so many Mexicans riding bikes now that you don’t want to ride bikes anymore,” he said with that grin in his voice. “That is if you don’t want to be Mexican,” I replied. He then went on a defensive tirade about immigration control and how they would start taking over their country. It was then that I truly realized that anti-imigration stems from racism.

My interest in Obama becoming a president didn’t start from his race. I started listening to his podcasts the summer before last and was taken by his intelligence, clear understanding of the issues and his ability to evenhandedly convey the arguments and options before giving his take and course of action. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I consciously or unconsciously worked a bit harder for him to make up for the sins of my father.

I suffer from sort of a reverse racism. When I was a kid, I was really into sports and music. Blacks like Jim Brown, Tommy Smith, Jimi Hendrix, and John Coltrane were gods to me.

I was in awe of blacks. And the best part about it was — generalization alert! — when you got to know them, many turned out be down-to-earth and warm in ways with which I was unfamiliar growing up middle-class white.

The way most kids today “don’t see color,” as Stephen Colbert puts it, is a source of wonder.

You don’t help anyone by whipping yourself as an adult for the ugliness of your environment when young…

As for Obama I admire him for overcoming the racism that is found in both black and white communities. After J Jackson’s comments I wondered whether those tears streaming down his face were the genuine article. Was he hoping that, perhaps, his new President Elect may catch his wet face on the telly…

I am disappointed, but not at all surprised, to hear about what happened to your nephew. The good news is that he’s growing up knowing that this text message is wrong, and he’ll help others understand that, too. We make progress one small step at a time.