If you have a personal story about how you were discriminated against because you are white (or Jewish) by blacks, please share. I would like to chronicle these stories and maybe one day write a book about it. The reason for this is because I have been mistreated myself due to the color of my skin. Now this may rock your boat Imerica but it's true.
Here goes:
I'm from upstate New York where we don't really see that many blacks. My first encounter with black was my next door neighbors. We lived on that block for seven years. My mother always taught me to treat other people decently despite our diffrences and while we didn't play with the black children, we all got along pretty nicely. When I was older we moved to another neighborhood and there was only one black old couple that lived on the block (it was a classier neighborhood). They pretty much kept to themselves. I believed what I had been taught in school that blacks were no different than whites. That was until I moved to the city after I got married.
All of the sudden I couldn't leave my house after dark. This was a new concept for me. I had never been restricted like that. But the real wake up call came when I gave birth to my second child in a New York hospital. (The first was born upstate.)
After an exausting 10 hour labor, I was wheeled upstairs to my postpartum room. I had not seen my oldest child since I began labor and I was anxious to hear his voice. You must understand that I had never been away from him for more than 2 hours and he was just 15 months old. I called my sister on my cellphone and she put him on the phone. Being in my emotional state, I cried when I heard his baby babbling. Everyone around me was really nice and let me speak to him despite hospital policies (they understood). When I was wheeled into my room, the black tech that was there began yelling at me to get off the phone. She didn't seem to realize that no one had a problem with it except her. Her job was to put the bed in the upright position. For some reason the string to pull the light shut was tied to the bed. Instead of calling for help to untie it, or untying it herself, she ripped the string and broke it.
The significance of her actions was lost on me until I tried to go to sleep. I had two hours to sleep before my baby woke up for the next feeding. When I tried to turn off the light I found that it was broken. At that point I was too exausted to call for help. Their system was you pushed a button and the nurse came on over a loud speaker. You had to yell to be heard and I had no strength for that. I gave the woman the benefit of the doubt because it was a big hospital and maybe she was very busy.
The next morning my black roommate had a lot of visitors. I could hear them chatting through the curtain. One voice was there for a long time. I gathered from the conversation that she didn't know the postpartum woman and was merely shmoozing with her. The whole day she kept coming back to talk to her. I assumed she must have been the womans midwife or doctor. Imagine my surprise, when I got up to go to the bathroom and I see it's the same tech who yelled at me the night before. She was a different person in the presence of a fellow black.
So much for equal treatment.