Keeping the conversation going...

I am 54 years old and have lived through much in my lifetime; a mostly privileged life for the color of my skin - yet I have seen and experienced enough to understand the pain and hurt many are feeling right now. I grew up in an all black neighborhood and attended an all black middle school. All my white friends from elementary school were supposed to attend that middle school with me but their racist parents pulled them out at the last minute. My mother wasn't like that and sent me fearlessly anyway. In the early 70s, I watched as real estate salesmen would knock on our door in Brooklyn where I grew up trying to convince my parents to sell and move because "black people" were moving in to our neighborhood. My mom would slam the door in their faces. Called "blockbusting", it was successful however in changing my mostly Irish, Italian, Jewish neighborhood into predominantly African-American and Caribbean-American. I've taught in disadvantage communities my whole 30 year teaching career, including east new york brooklyn in the early 90s where my students would tell me they had to literally dodge bullets from drug dealers and gangs just to come to school and make it to my class. I have seen physical police brutality against people of color (I remember an elderly black man being beaten by police on a deserted street by police as I drove by) and been a victim of police harassment for once having my hat backwards on my head (as the officer explained when he finally let me go) and for being in the car once with a friend who is black and suspected of selling drugs by police who had pulled us over when we were just coming back from making a recording in the studio in the middle of the day. My friend was made to get out of the car and sing for the officer to prove he was a singer while I was allowed to wait inside my vehicle before he let us go with a warning. In the 1970s, in the 8th grade, I was clubbed/beaten badly on the bus on the way home from school by black kids and called racist names for being the only white kid on the bus and sent running home for my life bleeding from my head. Just a year earlier, on that same bus on the way home from school, the bus driver saved everyone on the bus' life by not stopping at the stop where a mob of white kids were waiting to attack with chains and bats, pounding on the windows from outside the bus and shouting "we're gonna kill you n*****s!". I was pushed to the ground and hit repeatedly by neighborhood catholic school boys one day who exclaimed that I had something to do with killing Jesus when they discovered the prayer books I was carrying and that was on my way to Hebrew School at age 12. A few years later on my way home from high school on a bus traveling through an Italian neighborhood, a couple of innocent Irish kids on the back of my bus on the way home from school were ambushed by Italian kids and beaten with blood everywhere for "traveling through their turf and neighborhood". In college on Spring Break in Florida, my friends and I were invited to one of their cousins' house. I watched uncomfortably as a white father told his 7 year old son what to do with those rifles and hand grenades they had in a dining room display if a n***er ever came walking down their street. I have always loved history and took it upon myself, having seen bad people from all walks of life, colors and creeds, to learn more about the history of systemic racial prejudice in America and try to understand the world we live in from other perspectives. What is happening lately is therefore no surprise to me and doesn't even compare to what some people I have known have seen and been through in years past. I remain cautiously optimistic that there will be real change, especially when this divide and pain runs deep in this country's history, culture and systems. I hope through knowledge, lending a good ear, sharing my own experiences perhaps, I can help my current students to deal with understanding what is happening in the world around them, make sense of it, and perhaps do something to bring about change if they choose to.