Why I am Nice to Black (and Brown) People
I don’t suffer under a burden of responsibility for all that I am a Southerner. It is in my blood to know that my great, great granddaddy Lev must have hurled his share of racial epithets, even if he was too poor to be a slave-holder like my great, great, great granddaddy from Virginia was. I hate it, but I don’t hold it in my bones. I think it is mostly because I identify, for all my pale pinkness, with the darker of my human sisters. For us, it was white men who reached into our drawers and pulled out whatever caught their fancy, with no account of the age of me or that slave gal.
