some hope to balance the hate

I will attempt to balance these tells of woe with two very profoundly positive experiences.

I met a black man named Kevin on a job I had just out of high school. Being a temp worker in a big warehouse is lonely work. Everyone has their assignment and the place being so big, you might never see another person accept during break times. Anyway. Kevin was very nice to me. He treated me no different than anyone else. He taught me to drive a fork lift and because of that I was eventually offered a full time union job - Go Teamsters! This treatment was very hard to understand. It showed me that maybe not all black people were the same.

After some more negative reinforcement from another three black men I met at work (different job) I had reset my expectations of black men. I went to a doctor's office with my hypocondriac girlfriend (more on her later maybe.) We were the only people in the office, I brought a very thick Michael Jordan Wheel of Time series book to read (I was very used to being in waiting rooms waiting for her.) When a black woman and her daughter came into the room. I immediately looked at the arrangement of chairs and thought, "they are going to sit as far away from me as possible. Reverse discrimination is alive and well." The mom went to sign in and her daughter walked into the square arrangement of chairs and sat... Right next to me??? What the hell? I tried to explain it... These are the closest seats to the door, but they weren't. These seat are close to the magazines, but the magazines were across the room. She sat next to me to make her mom mad, but her mom didn't seem to even notice, sat down and started reading a book she had brought. Maybe she saw the book I was reading and was going to strike up a conversation about it, but that didn't happen either. Maybe she likes white guys, but she appeared to be 7-10 years younger than me. Maybe... Maybe... Maybe...
I was stunned. I felt queasy. It changed my thinking.