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.