re: #112 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I was a bookish nerdy kid in a minority white community. My mother was a widow and we simply could not afford to join the white flight to the suburbs. I got picked on a bit but there were other black kids who stood up for me.

Around Hunior High, we moved to a working-class white neighborhood where the kids picked on me mercilessly for being a brainiac and nobody stood up for me.

I grew up a Navy brat moving between three different cities (or really two cities and one town) that were largely Navy folk and their families so I never really was isolated from kids of other races and backgrounds. Most of my social isolation was self-imposed by just wanting to be the smart kid who sat in the back of class and read whatever he could get his hands on.

Probably why I realized that my grandmother is a closeted racist the first time she opined aloud that, despite it being the mid-90s by this point, she still hated Dr King and (yes) labeled him a “troublemaker.”