i was in part raised by a black man from virginia born before 1900 and have lived in situations in which i was a minority so keep that in mind as you read and listen to this post, before you decide i'm some sort of racist, and discover some realities on the claims of racism in this country;

I grew up in California in the 1980s. My blue collar suburb was mostly white, but did have a large Mexican minority. For the most part, we all got along. There were gangs in the city, but their battles didn’t affect us. I had some Mexican friends. I didn’t think much about race.

After high school, I attended an exceptionally diverse state college. In English class, we corrected each other’s papers in group sessions. I was shocked by the poor writing skills of the black students. “How did they graduate elementary school, must less get into college,” I’d ask myself. The Chinese students also had terrible grammar, but signed up for ESL tutoring after class. After just a few months in America, these Asians had a far better grasp of the English language than any of our black peers.

After college I moved to Los Angeles, near downtown. It was an open air lesson in race realism. Koreatown was clean but utterly foreign culturally. MacArthur Park, a beautiful area once upon a time, was strewn with half eaten corncobs, Corona bottles, and Central American gangsters. I followed the rule I’d learned as a child: Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. But adhering to that doesn’t make a difference with blacks. They argued with the Korean storeowners, harassed the heavyset Hispanic women, and threatened me when I passed “their” corner to get home. Still, I shrugged it off as a few bad apples.

As time went on, however, I could no longer ignore my own eyes. One day on the bus, I saw a young black guy sucker punch an older Jewish man for supposed disrespect, knocking him out cold. The black bus driver did nothing to help. In fact, he opened the front doors so the attacker could push the victim’s limp body down the stairwell and onto the curb, like a piece of human trash down the chute. Shaken, I got off at the next stop and went back to help the man, but he was gone. After that, I got a car..........read and watch more........