I’ve dealt with a lot of straightforward racism in my life. At five, I had my one of my best friends tell me that she would never be allowed to marry me because her father told her she was never allowed to bring a black man home, and that he’d kill the black man if she did (yep, five years old…). A few years later, while on a pretend dinosaur excavation in a public forest (I was imaginative), I accidentally emerged from the forest into someone’s backyard where I was chased out of someone’s backyard with a shotgun and called a “stupid nigger.” Fast forward to college and I wasn’t allowed to visit a girlfriend’s house because the father didn’t approve of his daughter having a black boyfriend. This same father continually sent articles to my girlfriend about black men who abandoned their children and wives while we dated…

Now enough about obvious racism, let’s move to a sometimes more dangerous form, the subtle kind. Coming into this, you’ve probably heard about subtle racism before, probably in forms like white privilege, standardized tests, poverty, or housing laws (btw, I recommend “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” to get a better understanding of how some of this started). And I think it’s great that people are becoming more aware of those, because they are a real problem and damaging. But I want to add another set to the mix, that often happens in a more direct human to human way, where people’s “preference” or expectations color their reality.