remember Gage Park

Again, I do not want to use the term racist when discussing people who prefer their own kind (Don't like that phrase with its unpleasant West Side Story connotations) because it is too much of a bludgeon and even between the three of us there is no agreement on what the term means.  So in that context yes, it would be, oh, dicey, to prefer the company of another race to your own.  Seems to me that if you prefer one you have to be, to some extent. disdaining the other, and if that disdain results in your not wanting to mix with a certain race (even your own) then yes, there is something wrong with that.

Absolutely Beagles is correct when he says that the thing to do is ignore race.  I am confused, are certain black people insisting that he relate to them all as a group or not at all?  Are they saying that he can't be friends or work with or live next to black people unless he relates to them as a group whatever that means?  And further does he take this perception of black people to justify his decision to not to relate to them at all?

See what I think we have here is a situation of hawks and doves.  Some black people are saying things that Beagles doesn't like (that curious thing about relating to them as a group or not at all), and let's call them the hawks.  Note that not all black people are saying that, just the hawks, but Beagles, being a hawk himself, hears only the hawks on the black side, and the black hawks hearing Beagles, the white hawk, use that to justify their own hawkishness, so the two sides are united in having hostile relations between the races.  Myself as a white dove, I mostly hear the black doves, and the black doves hearing my song of peace and love use that to justify their dovishness.  So the real situation here is not whites vs blacks, it's hawks vs doves.

I happen to know that Beagles was living in Gage Park until 1963 and is aware of Martin Luther King's march on the heavily segregated neighborhood and the violent response.  I guess that's evidence of people being able to live wherever they want.  I mean who would want to live in a neighborhood where they set your garage on fire or throw bricks through your windows?  It's just a matter of free choice right?

The way we city slickers (the doves among us, the hawks not so much) deal with the racial problem is by trying to get along.  My next door neighbors are black and there are one or two more on the floor and we all get along just fine.  We don't need no stinking 88 acres of swamp to protect us.