A lot of the advice given in the article is crap - simple fear of "The Other"
This, however, is Dead On:
I grew up in a majority-black neighborhood and spent better than half of my school days going to majority-black Public schools. IME the feeling (for that 5% or so) that "Whitey has it coming to him" is nothing at all like vague, it is absolutely unshakeable and acted on at every single opportunity. I didn't learn that from a book, or from my parents, or some academic study written by some suburbanite working in an Ivy League college somewhere
I Lived It
Every single day, for years on end
By the time I got out of 3rd Grade, the racially-motivated shakedowns, muggings, and just plain beat-downs had already numbered in the dozens. By the time I finished 6th Grade, I had lost count of the beat-downs completely. Never, Ever, a one-on-one fight. Always at least a four-on one mob, with the other kids on the streets or on the playground or in the halls (or even a few times, right inside the classroom) saying and doing absolutely nothing to so much as express the slightest disapproval, much less stop it from happening. Maybe half the time, there was even a soundtrack from the peanut gallery that went "Kill that White ************!!!" or some unmistakably race-based variation on the theme
Granted, these were what we locals call "the riot years" in Trenton - roughly 1967 to 1972 - and open hostility between the races was at its all-time peak. It also needs to be noted that one of my constant tormentors later ended up on Death Row (sentence now modified to Life Without Parole, by virtue of the State of NJ abolishing the death penalty), and that he was one Seriously Vicious MoFo. Most of the others who took such savage delight in beating me down regularly were part of the same extended family. They hated Whitey with a passion that could scorch the sun and send it running away, howling in pain from the burns
Almost forty years later, I've come to terms with the fact that such people exist, and that such people are certainly not limited to any one race or ethnicity. IME there is roughly the same 5% of the local Italian-American community that was (and is....) just as bad. Same with the relatively new Latino population in the area - again, roughly 5% active haters and roughly 50% who sympathise to the extent that they will not intervene (even to simply call 911) under even the most horrific circumstances
The only good that came from those early days is that it left me with a highly developed "Sixth Sense" for hostility from people who would just as soon kill me as look at me, based solely on the color of my skin. In this area, that small percentage of thoroughly vicious psychopaths is still dominated by American Black people. So be it. It doesn't stop me from treating the other 95% as fairly and as honestly as I possibly can, but I am not foolish enough to believe that I can simply walk down Southard Street, or Stuyvesant, and never encounter one (or more, since they tend to run in packs) of that 5% either....
