Racism is racism is racism.

Maybe one needs to be black to fully understand being the target of racism. I'm white. Living in a racist society. But so much of my early life was isolated from the impacts of racial discrimination. Growing up in southeast Wisconsin. Only one black family in town. An oddity. At college, only two black students. From Ghana, in Africa. So unusual. Remember their names to this day. Noah Dzoba and Christian Agbola. As a teen-ager, I spent parts of summer with relatives. In Chicago. That was really my first direct exposure to racial discrimination. My relatives didn't like blacks. Or Jews, for that matter. And my uncle Carl didn't like Italians. Which is a bit ironic and amusing. Because my true love is Italian. And I now live in Italy half-time. I love the place. Maybe more than America. Another thing. I like black people. More than some white folks. And I find Jews generally open-minded and politically and socially liberal. Like me. I'm far more at odds with conservative Christians than I am with Jews. Anyway, when I was in the Army in the late 1950s, I enjoyed the camaraderie. Because the military was fully integrated. Unlike the rest of society. I liked my black comrades. Certainly more than white racists/rednecks. Of which there were plenty. Wasn't until I was discharged and became a civilian again that I saw racism at its worst. In Floridsa. Heart of the Jim Crow south. Where I wrote for newspapers in the early 1960s. Before civil rights legislation. In Vero Beach. Nary a black family in town. Instead, blacks lived in a ghetto. Called Gifford. Segregation. Apartheid. Blacks bused past white schools. To under-financed, inferior black schools. Separate drinking fountains. Separate beaches. Separate everything. All this 20 years after World War II. When holier-than-thou Americans catigated Nazis for war crimes, for the Holocaust. While at the same time lynching black people in America. And denying black people basic human and civil rights. Even to this day, blacks are denied equal status. Albeit, in more subtle ways. But still, discrimination is discrimination. Unfairness is still unfairness. Racism is racism is racism. --Jim Broede