Last summer I lived in Friley Hall. One day I was eating in the cafeteria and an older person, whom I could tell was a parent by the seemingly lost expression on his face, put his tray at the end of the table I was dining at alone.

He scanned the dining hall, which was full of people, and seemed content to eat at the table he was already standing beside. His daughter came up with her tray and they spoke for a moment and then she pointed across the room. He gestured to the table, then pulled out a chair, and she said, “No, you must be with your own.”

You may be wondering what is so significant about this scene. Nothing really except that they were of Asian descent, and I was not. They wandered off to sit somewhere else. I wouldn’t have minded sharing the big, rectangular-shaped table with them. I, the white male, have no problem with race, but what do I do when people don’t want to be equals with me. I guess I have to keep on being the way I am.

See, what confuses me is when people deliberately point the finger at me simply because I was born a white male. On October 25, Gabriel Clausen, an ISU alum, wrote a letter to the editor in which he said, “For over 440 years white men have been doing things in our best interest. They rescued us from the savage, dark continent of Africa. They relieved us of the burden of taking care of our wives and children by snatching them away. They made the middle passage such a pleasant cruise by making us cozy and snug against each other.”

My ancestors came to America in the 1910s and the 1890s from Sweden and Germany. It is not fair to include me with those people simply because my skin is white. That is just as bad as if I were to say you liked fried chicken and watermelon simply because your skin is black. When you say “us” it also says that “you” were bound into slavery. I don’t think you were. It upsets me when I am nonracist and then I get racism thrown at me. How can you, Gabe, hope for equality if you aren’t willing to work for it?

Another letter from Brennan Buckley called the Million Man March discriminatory against women because it was all male. Now as much as I believe we need to be equal, I still believe we have the right to celebrate our individuality with those like us. I think the march was great not only for black men, but, despite Minister Farrakhan’s beliefs, for equality as well. This means we as males should be able to gather as men, just as females can do the same when the women’s conference was held in China.

To both of you I want to say that I cannot help that I was born a white male. I wonder what people would say if there was a march on Washington for white males. God forbid we celebrate ourselves, people with our gender and skin color have been known to be wrong (for lack of a better word) in the past. Personally, I’m glad to be me, and I’m proud of my ancestry—an ancestry that goes back to Sweden—but I’m also proud to live in America where, in the 1990s, people are more diversified than anywhere else on the planet, and are more equal than ever before.

I was once in the U.S. Army with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina for three years believe it or not, and I’ve noticed a big difference in race relations between here and there. In North Carolina (and in the army also) there are a lot more blacks. Whites and blacks interact quite often down there. Interaction happens a lot less here. Keep this in mind.

So here it may seem to nondiscriminatory white people like me that the blacks are more likely to judge me to see if I might say something racist, like when I once explained to a black man when we were discussing tombstones, that my friend wanted a black one, and I thought it would look cool. He looked at me oddly, and then I asked what the problem was. A white girl who was with him asked me if I had said that because he was black. Well, of course not, I didn’t even think of that. That’s how nonracist I am. I talk to black people the same way I talk to white people.

In North Carolina the black man would’ve been a lot less likely to look at me oddly.

In defense of blacks here, they are a smaller minority here, and they may actually run into more incidents where whites are discriminatory. Because of this they may need to pay closer attention to it, but I think there are more racists down there. What if they are just making something out of nothing? I went on a double date here where I was the only white person, and a girl said that there is a big difference between black homes and white homes and that difference was that black children don’t talk back to their parents like white kids do, because if they did they would get hit. I had to explain that this was simply not true.

To tell the truth I get tired of hearing race this and race that, and I hope someday skin color is as unimportant in judging a household or a person as turd color is.

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Tim Frerking is a junior in journalism mass communication from Pomeroy.