An ex-girlfriend had shifted deeper into women's studies, had spent a week or so chuckling over the fact that you could castrate by crushing, and in a bit of an

An ex-girlfriend had shifted deeper into women's studies, had spent a week or so chuckling over the fact that you could castrate by crushing, and in a bit of anger over my not living up to her ideals (we were still friends) called me "a racist sexist homophobe" which was the worst insult she could think of. Women have dealt with a lot of shit, so I understand the enjoyment of misery, but my testicles recoiled. At 20 or so, I was more of the latter two than I am now, not at all the last one that I can tell and conscious of my failings at the second one. Product of Chicago in the 70's. The insult came, if I remember the sequence of events correctly, after I said that in my experience white people can come by racism from daily experience, not just other people spewing it. I was mugged five times from 5th grade through high school, jumped for fun once, had an older girl say "come here little white boy, let me set your hair on fire" holding matches when I was in second grade, and had a crowd of 5 or 6 follow me and a friend home chanting "honky" and running up to almost touch us, I think around 6th or 7th grade. I've never been anonymously attacked by a white person, just a statistic but it's mine. I've also had plenty of black friends over the years. When I was in college I did a small thesis on race riots in Chicago. To my suprise, most have been whites rioting against blacks, especially moving onto a white block, and they were mostly not reported on in the papers to avoid spreading the word. I gained total sympathy for the shit they went through, and of course their kids would grow up feeling the burn too and trying to maybe even the score. It just creates a cycle that sucks. Gandhi and King were right, though progress hurts while the cycle is getting stopped.