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It's pretty awful being told you're a racist.

Not everybody is absolutely stupid. Why on earth would I be racist, what would I be trying to achieve?

Am I a racist? No. That simple. And if that's not good enough for you, too bad.

There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.

Nobody wants to be racist and I think that most people aren't.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody's ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the 'n' word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren't pretty or they weren't rich or they weren't clever.