Very revealing post from another board I frequent.

[MoonRiver]

"I am still trying to get my head around a conversation I had recently with a man I have known for more than 40 years. He is my other brother - my mother loved him as much as if she had given birth to him. When he enlisted in the Air Force after high school, our house was the first phone call he made from basic training. Our house was the first place he came on his first leave. He happens to be black.

We were talking recently about an occasion in which he went to court a few years ago. He said that the judge said, 'You are a 50-year-old black man and you have never been arrested?' My brother said, 'No sir, I have never been arrested.' Husband and my brother looked at each other & husband nodded and my brother continued with the story. I was flabbergasted - at both the judge's assumption that it was an unusual thing that 50-year-old black man had never been arrested and husband's and my brother's casual acceptance of the fact that of course the judge would think that. The judge would never have been surprised if my brother were a white 50-year-old man who had never been arrested. It would have never been occasion for comment. It simply would never have come up. Can you imagine that question to a blonde, blue-eyed white man? 'You are a 50-year-old white man and you have never been arrested?' The cultural context just blows my mind, as does my brother's and husband's matter-of-fact acceptance of it."