"It ain't no stereotype, it's just the truth."

I grew up right next to the tracks. Not on the wrong side, not on the right side. It was kind of a unique place in that these tracks didn't seem to divide the town into "haves" and "have nots." Both sides were the right side. When I got to college on the South side of Chicago I lived near the tracks again, except these tracks didn't have a right side. It was bad news everywhere. I'm amazed that I didn't get my dumb white ass handed to me on the way to the El stop (they don't call it the subway in Chicago) a couple dozen times, or even just walking down the street by campus. It happened to a few people I knew, so I guess I was lucky (or maybe big and intimidating).

There wasn't much diversity in the town where I grew up. Most of us were white and I think there were maybe a few dozen kids of any color at my elementary school. I played with one black boy in my class a few times, but really didn't have much contact with anyone but the white kids. I was shy, and except for seizing every opportunity to be the class clown I couldn't figure out how to make my presence known in a crowd. The crowd of black kids on the playground was awfully loud and intimidating in this respect, so I never got to know any of them. All the loud shouting and carrying on made me want to run back to things I knew.

Fast forward a couple of decades with political correctness run amok, white people can't talk about race without both tripping over euphemisms and facing backlash from all sides. One of the things I love about the kids at my school is that race is so ever-present that they talk about it casually, like it were no big deal. One of the black kids in the class keeps calling a character named Elroy (a white guy from the rural midwest) with Leroy. So I can say to him, "Aaron, Elroy's from the sticks and Leroy's from the hood. The story is out in the sticks," and everyone laughs and we have fun.

The third time Aaron remembers the joke and isn't confused anymore. It's thin ice sometimes and you have to be careful, but as long as you're respectful no one gets their feelings hurt. We can talk about whether or not it's important that 95% of the staff is white while only about 30% of the students are. We can talk about the obvious differences in different cultural groups within a single class as well as the school. We can do it easily, without having to use the words "black" or "hispanic" (or whatever) instead of tripping over phrases that are even more politically-charged like "African-American" or "Latin-American" (a lot of these kids are anti-patriotic and don't like the "American" part, and a lot of black kids say things like "my family came from Brooklyn, I don't have any ties to Africa"). It makes it real easy to get right down to the heart of whatever it is we're talking about. And we do it without fear of mistakenly insulting someone, without tiptoeing around the topic at hand, without resorting to stereotypes, and without pissing each other off.

You might be familiar with the game Taboo. The object is to get your team to say a word by giving clues, but without saying any of the taboo words written on the card. So one of the black kids stands up in front of his team and says without hesitation, "Black people like this."

"FRIED CHICKEN!!!" shouts the team in unison, followed by an unproductive three or four minutes while they all talked about their favorite side dishes and couldn't think about anything but food. Funny how some stereotypes have so much truth in them that it makes it impossible to examine why they're stereotypes with these kids. "It ain't no stereotype, it's just the truth." That's how they feel about it.