Ping to Lucy’s comment:
““There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson, Senior once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
“”Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse — for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not — can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.””
From Scientific American, quoted here:
http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/white_relief
Thanks melancholy - it’s an eye opener:
An August report by the Justice Department showed that in 2005, blacks represented 13% of the U.S. population but accounted for nearly half of its murder victims. Most of the black murder victims — 93% —were killed by other black people.
http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/white_relief