A Life Lesson

[Had video here, went missing from Youtube and I can't find it to re-link to it]

Pretty funny how our assumptions can come back and bite us on the ass. The video reminded me of something that happened in my college years.

The college I attended had a very strong black population. One day, walking from the dormitories to the building that housed my class, I crossed the main quad and stumbled my way into some sort of rally that the black students were having. As I walked across the quad, I became aware of someone shouting over the speaker, "Your people enslaved our people!" and I noticed that the black students around me were staring at me. I stopped and looked around and saw a middle-aged black man with a microphone staring and pointing at me.

"Excuse me?" I semi-shouted back. I was about two-thirds away from the 'podium' area from which he was speaking.

He reiterated, "Your people enslaved us!"

"Nope, didn't happen," I responded and began walking toward my class again.

The speaker made some derogatory comment about white people not accepting responsibility for the slavery of the black people.

Not being one who is able to keep quiet when I feel the truth is being mangled, I shouted out to him, "On both sides of my family, my immigrant great-grandfathers and grandmothers arrived just about the turn of the 20th century. My mother's side moved all the way to Santa Barbara. My father's side got stuck in the coal mines of the Pennsylvania area, which, if any of you know your history, was pretty harsh labor and akin to indentured servitude. He was one of the few who worked his way free and he resettled in Michigan. Neither side of my family owned slaves as it had been abolished a generation before they arrived in this country."

Also, seeing a ripe opportunity at making a shot back at the guy, I concluded, "You should really know your facts before you accuse someone based solely on the color of their skin."

I then proceeded to walk across the quad while a bunch of the black students around me smiled and clapped and the guy with the microphone blustered and 'um'ed' and 'ah'ed' his way back onto his hate-filled, anti-white person speech. But he had lost a lot of momentum. And I found I had a lot more black friends and acquaintances from that day forward.