I'd like to think that 15 minutes later a big, bad ass Daddy walked in and asked the grocer to kindly repeat what he'd said to his son.

(I do like my happy endings.)

Have you, as a white person, walked into a black store/club/whatever, lately?

What goes around, comes around.

And that 'Kings of Comedy' thing on the Comedy Channel...most racist shit I ever saw, bar none. I'm surprised they don't do bits in White Face.

Nah, nah. This was back when Negroes were terrified of the White Man. Sorry stuff.

I will never forget my first time seeing the whole racial mess. I was traveling to Fort Gordon from Fort Knox and I was 20 years old. I had never been in the South before. The bus stopped in Chattanooga, TN and when I got off I was hungry and saw a sandwich stand on the outside of the bus station with a water fountain beside it. When I went to order a sandwich they refused to serve me. I had to go inside and be seated and served by a black man with a towel over his arm because I was white. Blacks had to sit outside on a bench beside this rickety sandwich stand and drink water from a rusty water fountain.

Later when I was at Fort Gordon I got on a bus to go into Augusta. The driver made a couple of little old ladies get up so my friend and I could sit in the front of the bus. When we got off the bus it was in a black neighborhood so the bus driver stayed there until the other bus came along. I was so embarrassed both times. I was born and raised in a small Central Ohio town where we had black teachers, doctors, businessmen and no segregation. The first time I saw it I knew I wanted nothing to do with it. What a sick bunch of stuff to do to a race!!

Parts of the North were no better. Even now in some of the LLL parts of the North it still comes out. My black friend who runs an antique business tells me about the people who come into her store. I was there and even though the store's name is her name the people ask me for information on the items. There seems to be an undertone to all their dealings with her and she can just feel it in their attitude. She told me that it just creeps her out. Here she is busting her hump to run a business and is successful and these LLL soccer moms treat her like she can't possibly know what she is doing.

I hpoe somewhere along the line that someone told that child cruel words were a sign of the speaker lack of character and were nothing more than air in terms of the person they were directed at.

Glad you never returned.

Sorry stuff indeed. Reminds me of so much nasty that I prefer to keep locked up tight, way back, shoved into a little corner of my mind.

Even though it was more prevalent in the south, I lived far north and had a cross-burned in my yard. Racism was and is just as bad but in the north it's more hidden.

Now I'm going to once again shove it way back in a little corner of my mind. Some nasties you can't do anything about except not do them yourself.

I remember thoses days kinda...Growing up in Oklahoma wasn't as bad as down south was for blacks, but will never forget a sign on the corner of a very small burb on the outskirts of Tulsa that said: "Nigger don't let the sunshine set on your head in Broken Arrow"...I think the rednecks meant it too..MURRY

My first taste of bigotry was when I told my parents that the man I was dating was black. They told me to never bring him home. I honestly couldn't understand. I love people..period. I learned a lot from this man and he was a wonderful man and some people were too blind to see it because he didn't have the right skin color. It was appalling..I remember my horror and hurt.