I tried telling Klara the story of my school observation.
“Everybody at that school was African American,” I said.
“So what?” she immediately interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with that. They are people, too!”
What is it, folks? Do Americans imbibe it with the air? Is it an instinct to react this way to any mention of black people? There was nothing in my demeanor or affect when I delivered that line that was negative. I had a good experience at that school as evidenced by my earlier posts. My kid grew up observing me with my friend from Africa. I organized parties at our house where everybody except us was black. She has no reason to suspect me of bad attitudes towards black people.
I witnessed this years ago when my friend from Latvia said in front of her homeschooled American son that the best basketball players are black and he reacted like she’d announced she was joining the Ku Klux Klan. “Yours will be like that, too,” she told me and I thought she was full of it.
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