The girls' basketball game lets out. A couple hundred teenagers standing in the quad outside the gym.
My best friend and I waiting for his girlfriend who's on the basketball team.
Not our high school. Didn't know anyone. Waiting by ourselves, minding our own business.
When suddenly a Black kid runs across the quad, punches my friend in the face, and runs off to a waiting car to speed away.
His face bleeding, but he's okay. It happened in the middle of a quad, but no one seemed to see it, understand why it happened, or know what to do.
A few decades later, not long before I ended our friendship because of his consistently stubborn racism, I asked if getting punched by that Black kid in high school had shaped his views on race.
Defiantly, with no little display of annoyance, he said no. Why do I make everything about race, he challenged. And why didn't I do anything when he got beat up?
Since it happened thirty years ago, there wasn't a lot I could say or do.
And the conversation ended.
Ended like so many of our conversations about race and racism. With expletives and resentment and accusation.
And a total unwillingness to explore themes, motivations, patterns that have shaped racist views.
Ended definitively, I suspect, like so many conversations by so many White people.