i was raised in a similar manner as the writer of this essay and have come to similar conclusions based upon similar evidence, though i'd prefer it was not so;

When I was five, my mother washed my mouth out with soap for saying “nigger.” It was rude, she said, and only white trash talked like that. Back then, all the blacks in my hometown lived in a tiny community on the other side of the railroad tracks. They had their own church down by the river, and their children attended a one-room school built by philanthropists during the Great Depression.

I met my husband in college in the early 1970s, and was happy he was a liberal Southerner, too. We got married and bought an old gingerbread Victorian in his city, not far from my hometown. The realtor broke the rules and warned us that we would have black neighbors, but we told her we didn’t mind. She was aghast. For a long time, though, things were okay. The blacks in our neighborhood were homeowners and our children played together — but we didn’t socialize with their parents. It puzzles me now that I ignored that obvious dissonance. The truth was, we were living in a fantasy.

My husband worked hard, but I stayed at home with our children, so we had to be frugal. Our kids attended public school at first, like most of the other white children in the neighborhood. When my youngest started kindergarten, his class was majority white — even though the local high school was over 95 percent black. High school was years away, though. We thought we had plenty of time.

It was during middle school that whites started peeling away. My daughter’s white best friend began using ghetto slang, and her parents quickly moved the family. Even my sister and her husband, progressives who lived in a nearby city, moved to an almost 100 percent white town because of the “good schools.” Whatever their politics, nobody bothered to offer explanations or rationalizations. When our daughter complained about being teased at school because of her race, we knew we had to do something, fast.........read more........