Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

DesertDrifter -- first, and foremost, and of course -- you're absolutely entitled to your own take no matter what mine or anyone else's might be

my context was that I grew up in was racially-divided community, strictly segregated as to where folks lived (the blacks lived on the other side of Broadway) -- in elementary school (through 6th grade) was one of the whites assigned to the school that got the blacks -- during which, from the start, I (was one of very few of the white kids who at all) befriended blacks as well as other whites, and frequently got called n***** and n*****-lover as a result -- and as Martin Luther King rose to his prominence and the Civil Rights movement got seriously under way, I unashamedly and unabashedly defended him, and it; the other white kids who recoiled at that never did have any good answer to my simple question, 'so how is he, how are they, wrong?'; and as a result I earned the intendedly derogatory nickname 'Martin Luther', which I wore as a badge of honor

and so on from there with the rest of my life -- never did get married, but did get close twice, both times with a black woman -- in particular one, a fellow undergraduate, who in her graduate work went on to study linguistics under Chomsky, and then on to a doctorate in experimental psychology, to this day working on artificial intelligence (I thought, and still do think, that I'm pretty smart, because, well, I am and my entire life experience has validated that -- but for raw intelligence, sheer brain-power, I was and remain, relatively, a wannabe hack compared to her)

so anyway, I've had my own half-century of exposure to/experience with blacks and their culture, as part of/within the broader context, prominently including that of white racism/racists -- which fwiw has left me with my take