I am a black man in my early 30s living in New York CIty. Race has always been salient in my life. I grew up in a traditional, matriarchal black family in Virginia but attended a nearly all white small private school until the sixth grade. As a young child, nearly all of friends were white; I was always the lone black face at the birthday party. From the very beginning, I had issue with the things I would hear my family say about white people. They had opinions formed from growing up with the Klan and Jim Crow, and never hesitated to state these opinions. I only knew that I loved my friends and they treated me well, so my family had to be wrong about white people. It sometimes even drove me to tears. My middle school was predominantly black and low SES but it was relatively diverse when compared to most of the schools in the area. It was during those three years that I began to realize that race was important in our society. My High School was 99 percent black and sat squarely in the middle of two rival housing projects. Those four years were the most influential in shaping my racial identity and ideas about race in our society. I saw, and felt, the effects of institutionalized racism and began to understand that the struggle for equality was far from over.
After High School, I went to Virginia Tech, a large state school where about 3% of the 30,000 students were black. Tech, as we call it down there, was actually where the inspiration for this project started. During school, I was lucky enough to end up with a very diverse group of friends. Once, me and my core group of friends (i think there were 7 of us) spent the night at my parents house; the next day my father joked that I had brought "the United Nations" to the house. During that time, in trying to define ourselves and become who we wanted to be, we had many long, serious, emotional conversations about race. Some of these conversations ended in shattered friendships, others ended with agreements to disagree. But many of these conversations ended up with people, myself included, truly learning from and truly empathizing with each other. It was never easy, but one on one, completely open and honest conversation lead to the kind of understanding that has just not happened on a large scale in this country. Tech was a unique situation and the types of interactions I had while there are difficult to recreate in the real world. That is the basic reason for this project, to create a space removed from our personal lives, where we can talk and learn and grow together.
