Let me frame this properly.
I’m a white guy. My people split down two old American lines.
On one side: the nativist craftsman types. Builders, machinists, the kind of people who made things with their hands and had strong opinions about who “belonged.”
On the other: farmers and mountain people. Hard land, hard lives, not a lot of patience for outsiders.
Neither branch came with a handbook on cultural sensitivity.
A couple generations of bad luck later, my particular branch landed in a poor neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis just as the schools were integrating.
Everyone there was poor.
And when I was a kid, nobody liked anybody.
White families mistrusted Black families. Black families mistrusted white families. Everyone had opinions about the new immigrants starting to trickle in. Everyone carried the stories their parents handed them.
But something interesting happened over the years.
By the time I got to high school the neighborhood had changed. More integrated. More mixed.
Definitely poorer.
More real.
Take from that what you will.
As an adult I’ve worked in shops, warehouses, offices — places where the people mattered more than the job titles.
In one job I worked closely with three Black women.
One was about my age, though she carried herself like she was sixty-five. The other two actually were older.
Serious characters, all three. Good people in the old-fashioned sense of the phrase.
Church-going. Upright. The kind of people who would work sixteen hours a day if the company let them — and complain about every single minute of it.
Which, frankly, made them great to work with. You always knew where you stood.
One day one of them came in excited about a Mexican grocery store — a carnicería — that had opened up nearby. She’d gotten a tip and gone to check it out.
The produce was great. Fresh stuff. Ingredients you don’t see in the big chains.
For a minute the conversation was about peppers and fruit and spices.
Then it shifted.
And suddenly it was all “they.”
You know the tone.
- How they smell.
- How they talk.
- How they dress.
- How they pray.
All the little stereotypes people collect over a lifetime and carry around like pocket knives.
It went on long enough that I finally stopped pretending to listen to my headphones.
I took them off and said:
“You know you all sound exactly like every racist hillbilly uncle in my family talking about you.”
That stopped the room cold for about three seconds.
Then we all started laughing.
Because everyone in that room knew exactly what I meant.
Here’s the thing.
This story isn’t about pointing fingers and saying “See? Black people can be racist too.”
That’s not the point.
Every group carries its own version of the same nonsense. Stories about “those people.” Little boxes we put strangers in so we don’t have to think too hard about them.
Every one of us has heard those conversations. And if we’re honest, most of us have been in one.
The trick isn’t pretending we’re above it.
The trick is catching ourselves when we start sounding like the very people we used to complain about.
People are different.
That’s not a problem. That’s the whole point.
If we’re going to make this country better — really better, not just louder — we have to get comfortable with one uncomfortable fact:
The things we dislike in other groups often look a lot like the things we excuse in our own.
Once you see that clearly, something shifts.
You stop trying to win arguments about who’s worse.
You start noticing the more interesting truth.
Most of us are just people trying to get through the day, doing the best we can with whatever stories we were handed growing up.
And occasionally, if we’re lucky, we learn to laugh at them together.
