A reader from Southern California #racist amnation.com

Because of sports I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in South Central L.A. (it was purely black then but now is half-Hispanic) and saw the Great American Negro unrestrained in his native habitat. I learned quickly that whites who had the least contact with blacks were the ones who thought most highly of them and those like me who had regular contact, not with an anomalous few, but with your garden-variety black, understood the reality of racial differences. My experience made it clear to me that the old saw, “Once you get to know them you will realize that our differences are only skin deep,” had it exactly inverted. I quickly learned that the least of our differences were skin color and that the more I knew of them the less I wanted them around me or even in my country. Meanwhile, people who had zero contact with blacks back in the Fifties in Wisconsin or England gushed about how wonderful Negroes were and how our bad opinions of them were a matter of prejudice. I told those people, including one of my brothers-in-law who had grown up in England, that I hadn’t pre-judged Negroes but, quite the opposite, my opinions came from years of regular contact with them in the heart of South Central L.A.—or deepest, darkest Africa as we called it.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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