Dooce posted a link to this great article about the difference between jogging through an upscale neighborhood as a black woman and riding a bike through it armed with a machete as a white man.

Read the Affected Article on Chookooloonks

I was just thinking about this this morning as I ran down the trail at AMD/Spansion with the “No Trespassing” signs. An area where no one has even looked at me twice running.

I think about when a mom in our neighborhood sent out a note that her son was going to be walking to the pool with friends. You know, so we wouldn’t call the cops on them.

And last week I got unintentionally involved in a Travis Heights NextDoor thread where a neighbor reported that an unseen person pounding on her door in the middle of the night “sounded black”. A woman married to a black man who lived in the neighborhood was of course most concerned by this. But in the end the conversation had to be closed because there was too much “hateful talk”. Of course all the “hateful talk” was just pointing out that saying someone you didn’t see “sounded black” was uncool. But we all need to think of the racists’ feelings.