Small Town Whiteboys (Part Two)

Another season, much later on yet still entrenched in my youth, I asserted that aforementioned bias concept of mine, the one about not seeing color, to a Black colleague. She immediately prompted me that not referencing color in acknowledging a person of said color was itself a form of invalidation. Naturally she was right. I countered, asking her if it was appropriate that I refer her as my Black friend, when I surely didn’t want her to refer to me as her white friend, and she replied, “Because you have the freedoms to accept or not accept that designation and I do not.”