If This Is The White Experience, In America, I'll Shut Up

If it isn't, then shut-the-fuck-up:

“One of the things I think was hardest for me is I didn’t have any independent relationships with black people, especially adult black people, till I was an adult,” he says. “I was 25 before I saw a black doctor.”

As a child, he experienced racism before he had the language to understand it, he says. “For instance, shopping: I learned pretty early on that when people knew I was with this white lady, that they treated me differently,” he says. As he got older, he realized that if he didn’t want to be followed in a store, he’d better make sure people knew he was with her.

“I would hold up some outfit and say, ‘Hey Mom, could I get this?’ And she’d be like, ‘No!’ Which let everybody within earshot know that I was with a white lady, and then suddenly, that privilege came back over me.” “My source of love and hate came from the same well,” he explains. “My parents looked just like the same people who were calling me a n**ger or porch monkey. … My mother and my parents were in my corner, but it was still difficult to process.”

In college he began what he calls a “descent into blackness and out of whiteness.” He describes it as a journey, giving up the privileges he claimed as a child of white parents and learning to accept his identity independent of them. He added Sojourner to his name,...