Black skin, white skin, brown skin, what skin?

"Why is the Republican Party basically poison for so many African Americans?"
Cain replied, "Because many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view."

"A lot of these liberal, leftist folk in this country, that are black, they're more racist than the white people that they're claiming to be racist," Cain said Tuesday in a radio interview on the conservative Neal Boortz talk show.

I think I like Herman Cain because he's said what I've wanted to say for years. Growing up in Maryland, I had to deal with racism, as a white girl.

My first best friend was black and did I care? No, I didn't even notice. I didn't notice race until race was brought up. In elementary and middle school, I never looked at the "black" people any differently than the "white." As a matter of fact, I didn't even notice until high school. The black people would sit at their own table, sit at the back of the bus, the black people segregated themselves from the white, it was not done the other way.

Working at the gynecology office, right outside of D.C. (upper Marlboro area) I worked solely with black people. I was the minority. The doctors at the office were black, the nurses were black and most of the patients were black.

Did I care? No.

But the patients did, I guess. Sometimes I would get comments like, "I don't want to talk to you, where is the other receptionist [a black woman named Doris]?"

Some times they wouldn't talk to me on the phone because they could tell I was white or they wouldn't look at me when they check out. I even had them go so far as to ignore me when going to schedule a follow up appointment and look at Doris for assistance, even though she was on the other side of the room filing something and I was acting as receptionist.

Of course, living in Utah, which is mostly full of whites and hispanics, has given me a view into a whole other perspective. While sitting at lunch with some classmates they began to address the issue of race. They were intrigued that one of my white classmates had dated a black man. One classmate even went as far to say, "I don't date people that aren't my skin color."

I was not accustomed to such conversation but some of the people seated at lunch with me had never even conversed with someone black. I don't even think they knew that what they were saying would get them in a lot of trouble if they were saying it back in my home town.