Back when I was 20,which was 1985-ish, I was attending the Boston campus at the University of Massachusetts. I lived (and still do) in a suburb about 20 miles north of Boston. UMass-Boston is a commuter campus, and parking sucked, so I did the train-subway thing.
I had a friend, Leisa, who lived in Boston--Jamaica Plain--and drove to school most days. We occasionally hung out together. One fine spring day, we decided to go hang out at the beach at Castle Island in South Boston.
More on the flip....
Leisa told me she'd drop me at a stop on the T so I could take it back to North Station and the train. Fine by me. I thought she'd take me to JFK/UMass, the stop I usually took. However, coming back out of Southie, that stop was a little hard to get to. So, she told me she'd just drop me at a stop on her way home. Fine by me, going from Southie to JP you cross a number of the subway lines. Sure enough, we quickly came upon one.
Dudley.
Dudley was on the Orange Line, and this is back in the days where the Orange Line was an elevated track. The El winded its way through some of the more dilapidated parts of the city, including Roxbury, the 'black' part of town.
The Dudley stop was right in the heart of Roxbury. But it was right in between Southie and JP, so very convenient for Leisa to drop me off. She probably didn't think nothing of it--she'd lived in the city her whole life and wasn't a sheltered suburban weenie like me. I didn't even think anything of it, at first.
Until I climbed the steps to the platform, realized there were about 30 people waiting for the train...and I was absolutely the only white person.
Not only was I a suburban weenie, but I'd also been brought up in a racist household. White guy surrounded by 30 black people in Roxbury? I'd better just start planning the funeral now. That was the attitude I was brought up with. Did I think that?
Oh, hell, yes. You don't shake off your conditioning that easily. I saw these 30 black people staring at me like I had three heads and I figured they'd find my body underneath a train.
Then something happened. A guy a bit older than I was at the time, about 25ish, quickly sized up the situation. He saw most of his fellow passengers staring at this white boy who was trying to hide in the corner. And he did something about it--he walked up to me, a huge grin plastered on his face, and said, "Damn! What the hell is a white boy doing in Dudley?"
"My friend dropped me off here on her way home to JP," I replied.
"Some friend!" this guy said, laughing. "She should've just dumped your ass in Boston Harbor and told you to swim for it!"
That's when I started laughing--and feeling faintly ridiculous.
The guy and a couple of his buddies easily chatted with me, making me feel at ease, until the train came.
Does that make me a 'typical white person'? Hell, yes, it does. And any white person that doesn't understand that is lying to themselves.
The moral of the story is this: racism is conditioning. It's learned behavior. It can be unlearned. However, to un-learn it, you have to recognize it's there in the first place.
And sometimes a little help comes in handy. That guy on the subway platform took a look at me and realized, "This white boy is scared of us 'cause we're black." Of course, this must have bothered him. However, he had two options: get pissed off about it, or reach out.
He chose the latter.
And it worked.