ratbastid

I don't know about that. As a come-down Yankee, I'm not sure it's always that simple.

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. There's a great line in the film Six Degrees of Separation: "We're from Salt Lake City. There are like two black people in Salt Lake City." "Oh, yeah! I think I saw them one time! Two black people!" Literally, in the high school I went to, there was one black guy, a couple asians, and a whole bunch of middle class white kids. No latinos. It's not like I grew up in a racist environment, race just wasn't something I dealt with.

Then, I went to college in rural Minnesota. It was slightly more diverse, but not much. On my 3000-student campus, there was a small handful of black people, and they mostly hung together. I mean, wouldn't you? A few more asians, a few latinos.

When I moved to North Carolina it was MAJOR wake-up call about diversity and how the real world is. When I got my first job in NC, my manager was a big, powerful, amazing black woman--my first experience with such a creature. Suddenly living somewhere with some diversity, I had to really examine my automatic opinions and judgements about race. I had to deal with the issue that while I knew intellectually everything I needed to know about equality and racial sensitivity, I had zero on-the-court experience with it, and I certainly wasn't comfortable with it.

Even these days I have to deal with my racist tendencies. I catch myself looking at certain groups of people in certain ways, and I have to consciously pull myself back. What I find is that when I try to pretend I'm not racist, I have no ability to pull myself back. My automatic way of seeing people is just the TRUTH, and I've got no ability to shift my view in the moment. I have to stay responsible for my racism, keep owning my inner racist.