Now, while I've never called anyone "nigger" and don't like the word or really have any need to use it in my vocabulary, and, as far as I can remember, I've never openly commented on someone's race, (Ok, that's not true, I've definitely called some of my white friends “white” in a joking context if they do something stereotypically white, like eat anything with mayonnaise or hurry across the street for cars) but, despite this, I'd definitely consider myself a racist, for the following reason. Whenever I'm around a black person I don't know, my though process goes something like this. First, I get this totally irrational feeling like they're a threat to me, or I'm in danger, which I then conclude is, in fact, totally irrational (black is just a skin color, etc.) and yet the feeling persists, and I worry that they'll catch on to what's going on in my head (that I'm very obviously behaving nervous in a racist manner which lets on what I'm feeling) and I'll offend or alienate them. I don't want to offend anyone, and I feel terrible about these feelings, but I just can't get them out. If it matters, I don't have any close friends who are black. I do have one black acquaintance whom I used to know way back in middle school, and, while we're friendly towards eachother now, we were never really close, and in fact did not really get along in middle school. (This had nothing to do with race, though, I was sort of an outcast in general, mostly for reasons I'd now consider to be pretty justified, but which don't really matter for the purposes of this context.) I enjoy the music of some black musicians (I love Death Grips) and have always looked up to Martin Luther King Jr, basically as my favorite figure of modern history, but when it comes to black people in person, in come the racist thoughts. I need help. What's I find puzzling is that, if my memory serves me correctly, I wasn't always this racist. Way back in 5th grade, my family moved to another town, far away, because my mother had gotten a job there. For almost a year, I lived in this town, and went to school here. This town was much more racially diverse than the one in which I currently reside and where I spent most of my life growing up, and one of my closest friends in school was black. (I've never made many friends, and only have two people I'd consider to be close friends today, plus a small handful of acquaintances. I'm not a very social or outgoing person, and sometimes get nervous around people in general, regardless of their race.) The thing is, at the time, I didn't even really pay much mind to his skin color. I hardly even notice it; why should it have mattered to me? I even defended him when my (diagnosed neurotic) mother grew suspicious of him for no reason. I wish I could go back to thinking like I did then; what the fuck happened? Have the years I've spent growing up in the predominantly white town I moved back to when my mother's job went sour really left me so jaded? I used to think no different of someone if they were black, and now it's the first thing I notice when I see them. Fuck me, I know it's irrational, and I want to stop.