I’m wondering if part of the students sensitivity came from one hundred years of real victimhood after the Civil War end, where whites continued to lynch and massacres black Americans, predominately in the South, and were conditioned on the language of control? “You better shut up boy” often led to violence, beating and murder. By then, the idea of the “victim” only needed language to “keep them in place.” Any black woman or man knew for certain what would follow those words or that look by a mob of whites.

I experienced it myself when I went to Mississippi and was teaching freshman English in the mid 90s. As a “Yankee” from upstate New York, the whites looked at me like an invading foreigner. One day during a class where I had to leave the room to let the students do a review of my teaching, one kid not in my class who I didn’t know “snapped” when I answered him over my shoulder with a comment. His girlfriend who he was “protecting” was in my class and late, which I told her, and he had said something to me about that was not good. So after I kept walking he hunted me down to the lobby where a half dozen students sat, including one older white woman in open hallway lobby. He stood over me, almost violently shaking, and said staring straight down into my face about a foot away, “What’d you say? I dare you to say it again. I’ll beat you down right now. Go ahead and say it again.” I was terrified and said nothing, never having seen such an extremely violently reaction to a simple sarcastic over the shoulder comment.

Never “up North” had I experienced such absolute sudden violent rage, never had my life threatened, so vastly disproportional to what I said, too. My older brothers teased me and I learned to tease back, just like other boys in school up North. Boys learned to take it. Sure there were fights, but never such extreme reaction to a stranger, especially in front of bunch of people staring on. This young man, probably 19, was ferociously raging and if I had said “one more word” he would have beat the crap out of me, a young grad teacher. After he went away in my silence, the older white woman said to me, do you want me to get someone, we all witnessed it.” I said no, that’s alright, but later still shaken up a bit I went to the campus police. Who of course did nothing as they just sat at their desk in their.

I don’t think I would have the same opinion on this matter and would be dismissive if I really hadn’t seen what real “white privilege” and “white fragility” was. It was this angry white Southern form the “backwoods” of small town Mississippi, so dangerous he flew off the handle and almost knocked me senseless at such a trifling throw away comment. I probably would not have seen the world briefly, violently though a black person’s eye. These fragile white men sprang into violence at the drop of pin and snapped and killed Emmett Till, one of thousands in a long hundred lines of beatings, lynchings and rapes by whites that went on all the way up to the 1960s—and kept going. Because having a white president sign a civil rights act I’m sure didn’t recondition their centuries of sociological conditioned behavior. In fact, I experienced that it didn’t.