Originally posted on 04/29/2014:

Quote Originally Posted by wikkidinsane View Post
You have no clue
Allow me to get your back on this. I grew up a relatively privileged white kid - upper middle class, went to an SEC football school in the deep south. Freshman or Sophomore year, I randomly got paired up with a black kid who happened to be sitting next to me for a group project. We meet up one night and knock that project out, and he asks me for a lift if it's not too much trouble - as his mom (or sister, I forget some of the details) is at work and the bus is a miserable process.

I'm like "yeah, no prob". I give him a lift and it's in a poor neighborhood - mostly black - where I drop him off. As I'm turning the corner to leave his 'hood and re-enter my privileged white life, hoping not to return to this neighborhood ever again, I notice flashing cop lights behind me. I'm literally SCREAMED at "GIT OUTTA THAT CAR WITH YER HANDS WHUR WE CAN SEE EM!" Two white (redneck) cops literally SLAM me against my hood, slap handcuffs on me, and toss me violently into the back of their car while they search mine (I can't remember if they asked me but I want to say they didn't). When they find nothing, they let me go with a ticket for "running a stop sign" (utter bullshit), but they never apologize for the way they treated me.

The message I took from that as a naive, spoiled white kid not yet 20 years old was "holy shit - imagine the battles that black kids growing up in this neighborhood have to overcome. They deal with this literally every single day. I can't imagine how offensive and blood boiling that must be". The cops assumed there was no WAY that a white kid with a fancy car could be friends (or college classmates) with a black kid who lived HERE - I simply HAD to have been buying drugs. That was the ONLY explanation. When in fact, this black kid who grew up in a bad neighborhood was defying the odds to achieve something that these redneck white cops were never able to do - get a college degree!

To this day, I remain SO penetrating grateful that this happened to me, because otherwise I'd be like a lot of other white people - griping about how black people bitch and whine and how it's really not that bad. It really is that bad. There's nothing worse in life than being treated differently than others.