My experiences with racism and homelessness prepared me to write Same Kind of Different as Me, a book about a homeless Southern black man who grew up in slave conditions in the 20th century. When I first undertook that project, I knew little about institutional racism. But studying Jim Crow and the sharecropper era gave me a new perspective on the whole “slavery ended 150 years ago, get over it” mentality.

When I was a young teen, my mother tried to strangle me on a Hawaiian beach where we were homeless and living in tents. I had spent much of my childhood in the islands. I was in the minority, a “haole” (white) girl growing up in a liberal (if violent and dysfunctional) family and raised to appreciate the diversity of races amid the predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander culture. When I ran away to escape my mother, my grandmother took me in. She lived in Alabama.

I landed in the Heart of Dixie in March 1977 at the age of 14, and the culture shock was mind-blowing. I was accustomed to a vibrant blend of races, but in this new town there were, quite literally, opposite sides of the tracks. Blacks lived in rundown homes on one side of the railroad tracks, many in actual shotgun shacks. Whites lived wherever they wished. The first time I heard someone call a black kid the derogatory word we all know, I actually became nauseous. I couldn’t imagine a more vicious and demeaning word. When I was a senior in high school, a pair of Iranian brothers moved to town and began attending my school. A small group of us befriended Mohammed and Hussein. Much of the rest of the school called them names.

My experiences with racism and homelessness prepared me to write Same Kind of Different as Me, a book about a homeless Southern black man who grew up in slave conditions in the 20th century. When I first undertook that project, I knew little about institutional racism. But studying Jim Crow and the sharecropper era gave me a new perspective on the whole “slavery ended 150 years ago, get over it” mentality.

It is easy for white Americans to dismiss the fallout of slavery since the Civil War ended it so long ago. But during the Jim Crow era, Southern Democrats cruelly and systematically subverted the gains black Americans could have and should have made after the war. Blacks suffered for decades, a separate class, an un-people. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racism permeated much of America, especially the South.

So, yes, slavery ended 150 years ago. Street-level and institutional racism did not.

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