General Discussion

... told me when I was four or five that reason I should never ever put a coin in my mouth was because "some n____ might have peed without washing his hands and might have dropped it on a lavatory floor somewhere."

He was too low keyed about his serious racism, I didn't realize until I was in my twenties what a racist he was. I learned about being a racist on my grandfather's knee. He did too good of a job: Nat King Cole was my favorite TV personality. I never realized he wasn't one of us.

It's crazy, I lived in Cleveland. I would go downtown a lot. My grandfather's office was in the Terminal Tower, My grandmother worked at the May Company, my mother would take to some appointment with a Doctor, we used public transportation both directions, I do not have any memory PoC in Cleveland, a city at that time in the fifties as 30% black population.

I was eight or nine when I saw a black kids by my school and I asked my mom what was "wrong with that kid?" She told me he was a "colored" kid.

Kids learn how to discriminate from adults. I never heard a racist remark from my mother her entire life.

My dad was "liberal" racist. He hated n____s, he was very close to a lot of black folks to the point Roosevelt Dobbs was the "black" Marble Falls brother. When he ran an Enron plant in Houston, he threatened the bank he used with pulling all company accounts unless they allowed his black and Hispanic employees to have savings and checking accounts and be able to get car loans. To him Red Lining was a bad expression. He was a racist with a sense of fairness that included most everyone if they weren't rich.