I came across an interesting story in the news the other day.
The story starts about 25 or so years ago when Alice Brown, a white southern woman dropped her daughter off at Princeton....only to learn that her daughter had (gasp!) a black roommate:
"I was horrified," recalled Brown, who had driven her daughter up from New Orleans. Brown stormed down to the campus housing office and demanded Donnelly be moved to another room.
The reason: One of her roommates was black.
"I told them we weren't used to living with black people — Catherine is from the South," Brown said...
....
Donnelly (the daughter), now 44, captained the basketball and volleyball teams. She was the homecoming queen. And she racked up science and math awards, often with the help of her mother.
But the "Three R's" weren't the only thing Donnelly learned from an early age. There was a fourth one. Her mother and grandmother filled her head with racist stereotypes, portraying African-Americans as prone to crime, uneducated and, at times, people to be feared.
Brown, 71, explains that she was raised to think that way. She recalls hearing her grandfather, a sheriff in the North Carolina mountains, brag about running black visitors out of the county before nightfall. And Brown's parents held on to the n-word like a family heirloom...
...
When Brown heard about Barack Obama's former pastor — his angry rants against white America — she didn't like it. But she understood. "If I had been treated the same way blacks have been treated," she says, "I'd be resentful, too."
***
The black roommate......Michelle Robinson Obama
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news...mate_0413.html
Its ironic and quite frankly, very discouraging, that this 71 year old white woman, raised in intolerance, can now "understand" the anger (although she draws the line at interracial marriage).....yet some of the younger, educated, urbane white guys here still dont get it.