I grew up in an all-white community. When my family would get in the car to travel, and we had to pass through a neighborhood with people of color, I can still hear my mother telling us to “make sure the car doors were locked.”I can recall, from grade school to college, the infinite number of Black jokes that me and my friends would tell.
We didn’t know any better, but we should have, and now I feel humiliated thinking about the way we used to talk about Black people.