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I have two funny high-school stories that relate to this thread. The first is that during our talent show.. 5 of my white high school friends dressed up as the Jackson 5, they went to a thrift shop and purchased 70's clothing, got clown wigs and painted them black, and of course painted their faces and hands brown. They pulled into the school in the one guys mom's Pontiac Parisienne, blasting Cyprus Hill, and I think every black person in the school turned their head. When they got out of the car, someone realized that they were white and it appeared that everything was about to go to hell at that point, but a friend who was black stepped in, and told them that they didn't mean anything by it.. it was all in fun. So I think it depends on the context that its taken in.
The second story shows how we see color. In our school we had about a 20% black population, lots of Italians, Portuguese, and were just starting to get Indians. So in this one class we had 4 black people A set of twins (brother and sister), this one guy Ewan, and a friend named Kevin, (think Carlton from Fresh Prince) Now it should be noted that this was the early 90's when the hip hop culture was still finding its roots up here. And that many of the black people in the school we had gone to grade school with, spoke just the way everyone else did, and hadn't adopted the black culture yet.
So this one Italian guy makes a reference to Indians and uses the term Packy. At which point the teacher snaps on him and says "How dare you use a derogatory term in this class" and makes reference to the fact that the only reason that he used the term was due to the fact that there were no people of Indian descent in the class room. And says that he would never have used the N word due to the fact that we had 3 black people in the class. At which point Kevin puts up his hand and says.. "Uh Miss, which one of us are you forgetting?" Knowing full well .. it was him.
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