Excellent article. Compelling and readable.

It's worth remembering that we do not know the day-to-day experience of our neighbours. There's a good chance that it is not the same as ours -- particularly if they differ racially, by gender, or gender-preference.

The response of the school authorities to the experience of the author's son is sad and pathetic:

It also was a lesson for us to grasp that some white men may believe such acts are really no big deal. I called a dean at the boarding school, who seemed to justify the incident as something that “just happens” in a place where “town-and-gown relations” are strained, but he had little else to say. My son’s school adviser never contacted me about the incident, acting with the same indifference that so many black parents have come to expect. After I reached out to them, I never heard from either man again. Like so many whites who observe our experiences, these two privileged white males treated the incident like a “one-off” that demanded no follow-up and that quickly would be forgotten.

I was in a story-telling group once and I told a story I had heard about racial discrimination in a small Ontario town. it's a long story that I wrote about here. When I was done my story, a white man in the story-telling group said very loudly that he had been the high school principal in that small town at the time of my story and he knows for a fact that there was no discrimination in that town. He really believed it -- because he didn't see it, or experience it himself; and if there was a complaint, it would have been dismissed as a one-off and not acknowledged.

8bit - how did you feel when you read the article from the Washington Post?