My white friends had black friends (me, for instance) but they didn't experience what it was to be a black kid in college.
But she was a black kid in college, she looked very much black.
Neither Indians nor Jamaicans consider themselves African-American, nor would they have raised their child as an African-American or live in an African-American neighborhood. It would be an error to presume an African-American experience.
What neighborhood did her family live in?
More significant is what she has done since college. Her record has not shown perception of the African-American experience.
How so?
When I was in Oklahoma as a teenager, there were kids from the Ft Sill Indian School who got some limited slots at my high school. I know that they sometimes got called "apples" by the kids still going to the Ft Sill school.
That wasn't the point. We have a member on this forum who is Native America but wasn't raised in a Native American family or on a reservation. Does that mean they didn't experience what it was like to be Native American in this country? If they were South American Indian raised in this country, wouldn't they know what it is like to be Native American in the US?
I had a Latino, Spanish/South American Indian from Chili, South America, friend in college. Just like Harris, his family moved to CA when his father was getting his masters or PhD, I don't remember which, at Berkley. My friend was 10 yrs. old at the time. He experienced what it was like to be Mexican in the US because it was just assumed that he was. He developed a prejudice against Mexicans who were seen by Americans as being lazy. That was due to the way he was treated as a kid in CA and as a college student he made sure that he corrected anyone that referred to him as Mexican.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, but it seems to me that how you are treated is because of how and what others perceive you to be, and therefore, would have had the African-American, Native American, etc. experience in the US.
Even in the 60s being black in the south was a very different experience than in the north and I would imagine than in CA, as well. I suspect that it is still somewhat the same today. We went on a road trip through the south in the 90s and I can tell you we got really strange looks from blacks when we stopped to get fuel at a little convenience store and used their bathrooms, both from the person in the store and those hanging out in the parking lot. You would have thought we were aliens from another planet.
