I was born in Chester, Pa, where the majority of people are black, until I was eight years old. While I was there, I attended private school about 20 minutes away, and  I can clearly remember when I had birthday parties or invited classmates over, some of their parents wouldn't let them come over. My parents explained to me that although we were in fact safe, many people believed that our neighborhood was dangerous, which

always baffled me, because I'd never had a reason to believe that it was dangerous. I always heard plenty of sirens and knew there were supposed "bad" sections of the city, but that was all very abstract to me. When I was eight years old, we moved about 15 minutes away to the more affluent and demographically white suburbs. Despite the close proximity between the suburbs and the city, the conditions of living are vastly superior and there is minimal interaction with or acknowledgement of Chester. When my new classmates talked about the city, it was usually to remark that you might get shot if you went there and when I told them that I used to live there, I was usually met with disbelief. For the majority of my schooling, when racism and race differences were mentioned it was usually the white washed history, in which slavery was emphasized and the civil rights movement was superficially covered.We were taught that Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and that dream came true. Racism was approached as an individual moral problem and it wasn't until later in high school that we discussed racism as a system and ideology. Subtle racism was was definitely all around us, but never acknowledged unless it was expressed in an overt way. 

I found the first chapter of the book really interesting, because so often race is accepted as a logical, concrete thing. We don't often interrogate our language and how it structures every day social interactions. What's more, although race is an invention with inconsistencies in terms of who fits what category globally, it still has a very real impact in terms of power relations and social goods. I thought it related well to what we briefly talked about in class, when we touched on how Irish and Italians were originally discriminated when they began emigrating to the United States, until they were eventually assimilated into the "white" category. It seems that humans always desire to partition the world around them, particularly when it comes to the concept of us vs. them in order to validate their particular way of life.