Painting with the same brush.

A few nights ago, I was talking with 2 white kids. They were talking about a klan run town a few hours away. They both grew up in small towns, where there were few to none minorities.

Both started speaking about blacks. In front of my face, they started saying that some of the blacks in their towns got mistreated. But then the guy said that "how you act matters".

He was referring to the fact that they exhibited "ghetto behaviors"....But the reality is they probably would have been mistreated regardless.

The problem was they were going on and on about how a black person should act right. I then said, well the problem with all of this is that you paint all blacks with the same brush. He would talk over me and discard what I was saying, which was that you can't assume one is ghetto for certain things. In an all white town, a black person will be mistreated, not because he is ghetto, but because he is black.

I was with a whole group of people and we all went to Burger King after this event, there was me, a black dude, a couple of whites and a couple of asians all of us together as a group.

This very old white woman sitting down, was giving me one of the most dirtiest looks ever and just watching all of us...eventually she left. She wasn't the first to do it, as my town is extremely racist and white people often do this all the time to blacks.

After we left, I was talking with this white girl, about her roommate. Her roommate is black (I am the only girl of color in my room).

She was talking about how they did not get along. I haven't spoken to this roommate. But I could tell what kind of girl she was as I have seen her. She was the type that I did not get along with in high school, she was the wannabe ghetto girl, who was loud and obnoxious, rude to everyone, always gave mean looks to you (she does this to me every time I walk by the lounge to go downstairs or back to my room, she and her buddies have taken over the lounge and do not allow others to enter unless they are in with her).

She then told me how her roommate represents a "ghetto black girl" and said she makes the black race look bad...it was then all of a sudden I started thinking about that label. I myself use it all the time, but then I realized, why are black girls labeled "ghetto" for being bitchy, I had only just a few minutes earlier spoken of my white roommate, who hates me and never even spoken to me. Although my problems with her have yet to get as intense as theirs...aren't both roommates practically one in the same?

It confirmed what I always knew to be true. When you are black, you really do not get individuality, let alone a fair analysis. If you don't act white, you are considered ghetto.

But I think what really angered me was the fact that, white people will often let the actions of one black person to speak for an entire race.

Just look at the Kanye incident. Beyonce does a stand up thing and is forgotten. You can know a good black, and it won't matter, as long as that bad black person is existant. People measure the black race not by its good people, but by its bad, and then they punish the good regardless simply because of the bad.