I have an interesting true story, although I don’t know the moral. A woman once told me that when she went to her black doctor, she flinched when he touched her during her examination. When he asked why, she said it was because she had been raped by a black man. He got upset by this, and she was very upset that he got upset. Couldn’t he understand that she was not racist, that this was a perfectly natural reaction? I asked her “can’t you understand why he would be upset by your reaction, after having been exposed to a life of racism?“ I was wrongly condemned by the other (white) people in the conversation for being insensitive to what she went through. In a way those people were right. I didn’t have a dog in either fight, which made it easier for me to see both sides.