This weekend I was driving behind a car full of young black men. Even though they were driving safely, I wondered about where they were going. Then I felt guilty about it.
Further down the road, I realized that I probably would’ve wondered about a car full of young white men, only without the guilt.
It was then that I realized that it doesn’t matter what race strangers are – I simply don’t like strangers.
I remember a sketch Eddie Murphy once did on Saturday Night Live. His character wondered what it would be like to be white, so he had himself made up to look white. His experience was a parody, of course, with shopkeepers urging him to “just take” store merchandise and other such incidents. It was good for some laughs, but the underlying question is tantalizing: what would it be like to be another race?
That’s a question that can only be answered in another lifetime.