Poet, I do appreciate everything you are sharing about race. I just wanted to add some comments (and I don’t think I have “misperceptions” of you so much as some other perspectives of my own, which may or may not be valid).
I lived in Los Angeles for a total of 17 years, and it can be a dangerous place. Mostly I lived there as a single female in apartments for people with average incomes, which meant my buildings were filled with people ranging from professionals to welfare queens. People of all races and colors and backgrounds.
I’ve made friends with guys “from the hood,” from completely outside my socio-economic background as a white girl who primarily grew up in midwest suburbia. It’s pretty easy to do, just be nice to them.
I’ve had a friend who has been in jail multiple times for beating people up, not someone I could ever imagine knowing from my sheltered childhood. But he’s mostly a good guy and I know in a pinch he’d protect me if something happened. I made friends with some hispanic guys who were living next door to dealing drugs to make a living. These guys loved me and I am certain I had an added level of “protection” because I was nice to them. They knew how to pick locks (I saw one of their friends break into their own apartment in a manner of seconds by picking the lock when they had lost the keys) but I didn’t worry that I was going the target of a breakin because to them “I was cool.”
I used to date a guy who had been one of two guys who escaped his gang from high school. He had broken legs though hadn’t killed anyone.
For me the big lesson I learned in LA was that, one of the best survival skills you can have is to know how to make friends with people from completely different backgrounds than your own. If I, a midwest gal, can make friends with “gangstas” then I’m sure you can make friends with white Christian conservatives. Maybe not every single one of them, but a good number of them.
Furthermore, from my time in LA, I was less worried about bloody violence for myself even though I lived in an area with a good amount of crime, because sadly, it seems that the minorities in LA do their damndest to shoot and kill themselves over white people. Or shoot and kill each other. I have actually remarked to friends, why don’t those gang members from South Central drive up to Beverly Hills and go postal on the rich people there? But they don’t. (Usually. Though a famous PR woman I knew was just shot there in the last week.)
Meanwhile, the 35th murder in Austin this year has been a hispanic guy going postal on an hispanic couple that ran into his car. Not a white guy going and killing a person of color, or the reverse. Who probably beats, rapes, and kills more white women than anyone else? Their own white husbands.
It’s almost like, people like to eat their own first, and so maybe that’s why it’s snobby white people who are the hardest on and most angry towards “white trash.” I even had a conversation with a black guy here in Austin yesterday about it, where he was telling me about how a rich white person coming into the store looked upon a poor white trash person there with utter disdain while being totally cool with him.
So it’s not even about race so much anymore as class or internal conflicts within races that I see being a big problem.
All I know is, the best antidote to being isolated and left out of a group is to make personal connections with people.
Perhaps a discussion of race and class would be better started in the forums? I find this is an interesting topic and worthy of more sharing.