as an older individual i come from a land far away where the things covered in this essay were quite different. and as a quaker i was raised to think differently about these things but evidently, according to this writer, things ain't like the tv wants us to believe;

I was born in 1974 and grew up in a large, white, lower-middle class family. My father worked as a construction project manager and we moved around a lot. Nearly all of our time was spent in the upper Midwest — small towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Upper Michigan. Despite the constant moving, it was an idyllic childhood. Most of the towns we lived in were either 100 percent, or nearly 100 percent white.

I saw absolutely no drug use whatsoever during my entire childhood. The only substance use that I saw first-hand was alcohol and tobacco. My family was Protestant Christian, of the gentle Northern European variety, and so I was fed a steady diet of anti-racism and anti-discrimination indoctrination from a very young age. In short, my knowledge of non-whites was entirely theoretical until I enlisted in the US Navy after high school. The day before I left home, I believed everything my schools, churches, and the media had told me about race relations in America.

I was immediately thrust into a totally alien world. Boot camp was a transformative experience for me. Fully 40 percent of my boot camp company was black, another 20 percent was Hispanic. I saw first-hand how different races intentionally, happily, self-segregate. Even though our bunk assignments were almost totally random, during our very limited down time the blacks quickly took the back half of the barracks for themselves, the Hispanics claimed a few next to them, and us whites kept to ourselves near the front.

For the first time in my life, I experienced racism when I naïvely tried to interact with blacks and Hispanics the same way that I did with my white shipmates. It was confusing: I had moved around enough in my childhood that I had learned how to get along with nearly any personality type, but just my appearance and voice seemed to irritate non-whites. As soon as I opened my mouth their eyes would go flat, they’d put on a hostile expression, and they’d either ignore me outright or mock the fact that I enunciated my words and used normal grammar. This was also the first time I witnessed how quickly non-whites can shift from passivity to violence. I saw more fights in ten weeks of boot camp than I had in 18 years of my civilian life.......read more.......