Been mugged three times, once by a Hispanic, twice by groups of half-dozen or so black teens. A fourth encounter provided the only time I've ever felt the need to draw my gun in self defense.
Like Obama said in describing his grandmother "...she is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know there's a reaction....." Yep! I am typical.
Every family has stories; so has mine. Not a lot of bluebirds fluttering around singing about happiness and bonhomie when it comes to the subject of race.
Lincoln, when he died, had Gen. Dan Sickles (of Gettysburg fame) down in Panama and New Granada (Colombia) working on a project to take about 2,000,000 ex-slaves down to Panama to dig a canal. This was generations before yellowjack was beaten, even before the French tried. Can you imagine what the outcome of that would have been?
He was long a student of the colonization movement and never gave up his idea that it would be likely impossible, post-emancipation, for the two races to live in amity.
Gen. Ben Butler took an interview with Lincoln just a few days before the assassination; part of his brief was a progress report on Sickles's work. After the assassination, everyone forgot all about Sickles, and he was still down there six weeks later when he was informed about the President's death by an Indian runner.
Sickles's files, by the way -- the American ones -- have been gone through and his daybooks and message traffic pared and removed. Most of his file material has been systematically destroyed.