Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I really want to avoid talking past each other. For you and I there is no good reason to be a victim, no reason that we can not compete in the marketplace like everybody else. These things would not be true if our skins were dark.
I immigrated to my long time home town here in Utah on a ten speed, carrying only what I could pack in my bike panniers. I arrived with an apartment to share and a $20 bill in my wallet. I was almost 21. I taught myself a trade, largely by telling clients that I knew how to do the job (I didn’t) and relying on their trust. Five years later I walked into Industrial Supply and approached Denny the credit manager to ask for an unsecured signature loan to finance the tools I needed to launch a carpentry business. He gave me that loan on a handshake and I never looked back (for long;).
My remodel clients handed me their house keys and headed off to work and sometimes out of town. How much of that would have been possible had I not grown up in a house full of books and music, had I gone to rotten schools, had no relatives who had completed college degrees, had no clue how to talk to the up scale clients who made up the market I exploited? The night I arrived in Salt Lake two tall blonde cops stopped me as I pedaled into the residential section where I would live for the next couple of years, 2:00 am and I had long freaky hair and no form of ID (I had destroyed it all in preparation to go under ground in my Vietnam draft year). They politely asked me questions and then sent me on my way. My interactions with police have always been relaxed, the cop who pulled me over after I had belted far too many drinks at a birthday party merely gave me an equipment ticket. Doubt I wouldn’t have been spread on the hood and told to walk the line if I had been black. The cops who confronted me with guns drawn when I clipped a security system wire while remodeling a vacant house didn’t scare me, I knew they wouldn’t shoot. Pretty different situation had I been DWB, demolishing while black.
Today our schools are as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board, if not more so, and those that are mostly minority are mostly pretty awful. White people in America swim in an ocean of privilege in comparison to darker skinned people. Like fish in water we are usually unaware of that privilege. I wonder how well we would do if the situation was reversed, if we had to lecture our teen age boys on the things they must do to avoid being shot by cops and other gun toters, if people with English sounding names didn’t get call backs when they applied for a job, if our parents had been systematically denied mortgages, denied participation in VA loans because they had been excluded from service, from home purchase in “decent neighborhoods”, had no accumulated wealth to help us with higher education or first home purchases. I wonder if we would resent the people who possessed most of the money and power and hated and feared us because our skin was white?
