In a class of 25 you would expect on average 3 black kids. That’s it if the entire country had a nearly perfect distribution of blacks. Very few blacks I know will tolerate living in an area with less than 30% black. Which means whole swaths of America have very few black people and it’s not because they are racists. I have been in plenty of those communities all across the country and generally speaking the few blacks in those places have celebrity status.
I grew up being a speck of pepper in a sea of salt during the fifties and sixties. I never thought of myself as different, until other people forced me to focus my attention on the color of my skin.
In my childhood, I was taught that family is 1st, country is 2nd, and race is a distant 3rd. That is still my orientation to this very day, though political orientation has now superseded race as number 3.
At the core of my being, I’m just a simple American boy.