I’ll step up. I was raised in the south by… well, okay by the kind of racist white people that say they are not racist even though they don’t like people of other colors inside of their field of vision.

I am not white myself, and so I got preferential treatment. I was “one of the good ones”.

Plus, as a Native American, I kind of had like this weird, beneficent racism thing where they were like, oh, he can talk to horses, and he can hear it in the trees, and see it in the wind, all of that stupid shit.

Anyway, I didn’t really mind people of color, black people, I would talk to them and be friendly with them because I didn’t have any reason not to be, right?

But sometime around when I was 18 years old, I suddenly realized that I would change my way of speaking when I was around black people. I would say things like, “yo, dog, what’s up?” Instead of, “hey man, how’s it going?”

And I realized now that that is ingratiating behavior. I wanted the other people I was around to feel more comfortable with me, and so I was imitating what I assumed was their speech pattern.

But I also realized that I was pigeonholing them into acting a particular way. I was maintaining the concept that “Black people talk like black people” instead of “people just talk”.

Once I realized I was doing that, I dropped the act and started continuing to be myself when I was around people of different races.

And you know, I made better friends that way. People liked me more and they responded more favorably to me, which to me feels like justification that I made the right decision.

I guess I should have said my past “ignorance” instead of my past “views”, because it’s really just assumptions I made based on stereotypes and because I was indeed ignorant. I can remember being in high school (a VERY white high school, we legit had no POCs at all) in my teens and one of my classmates went on vacation to China, and when she got back I asked her didn’t everyone there look the same?? Because all Asians look alike, right?? (please note my sarcasm there)

I remember when I first joined the Army, meeting a black girl my age who loved Metallica and this blew my mind because I’d never known any black people who liked any sort of rock, because they only like rap, right?? (/s). Or when I assumed that trying to manage my own very curly hair was somehow relatable to a black person having to manage THEIR curly hair (it isn’t, at all).

It was never anything outwardly damaging, it was just little ignorant thoughts like that, where I was able to look back on them and be like whoa, I was really wrong/ignorant/racist to assume that. But I also think that that’s part of growing up in America, unfortunately, you don’t realize what’s behind thoughts like that, and yes, I think EVERYONE has those moments of ignorance and covert racism. The trick is to recognize them, learn from them, move on, and not make them again.