While listening to NPR this morning, a segment came on concerning what is possibly the most popular song in history: "Chattanooga Choo-choo". Personally, I love this song for its style, its sound and its unrestrained enthusiasm. However, it doesn't come without history. And baggage.

You see, this very day, seventy-five years ago, saw the song's premier. 1941. It was the year of our entry into the second World War. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment had been going for nearly a decade (and would continue for thirty more years).

And segregation was the way of things.

What does all this have to do with the famous song? The line "Boy you can give me a shine" gave me pause. Granted, shoeshine boys were mostly juveniles. It was the norm to address not only boys as "boy", but also to address a full-grown African-American man as "boy". The point of addressing a man this way was to impress upon him the point that he was still less than a man.

The period brings me shame. No human should ever be diminished by another. While we have come a long way since then, we still have a long way to go.

I realized some years back that I have a mild case of Asperger's. For the longest time I thought myself out of place. Because I am. I also knew that I looked at the world differently from most. In some ways it has proven disadvantageous. I needed to learn (sometimes the hard way), behaviours and customs that "normals" learn automatically and take for granted. But when talking to a lady about racism, I realized that Asperger's has proven to be a tremendous benefit to me.

You see, I was raised in a time and place where racism was not only tolerated, but encouraged. A fact that I have addressed before. I never understood racism. It made no sense to me to discriminate against another population just because of the amount of pigmentation in their skin. Still, I tried to fit in. For years. The "jokes" of the time, which were anything but a laughing matter, rang hollow. It took an astute friend (in College!!) to help me understand the violence in the so-called jokes.

So, how exactly, was it a net advantage, viz racism? Because I didn't (and still don't) learn behaviours the same as other people, I didn't automatically internalize racist behaviour. I still have the occasional racist thought flash through my mind, as I have confessed before, but I can deal with it, separate it, and analyze it so that I can keep myself from passing on the racism that society had tried to instill within me.

It's time to be candid. Some of my whiter friends and family wonder why I'm so hung up about race. It's a story some fifty years in the making, but I'll try to be brief.

I'll be using an evil and very blunt term that begins with 'n', so be warned. It's relevant here, otherwise I wouldn't use it.

I live with a daily struggle. I'm racist. While not consciously so, the fact remains. A bit of background is in order. Being a person, half-century in age, at this point in history, I was raised during a time when cultural-generation attitudes on race had finally started down the long road of change.

Previously, racism was accepted and even encouraged. I remember in fourth grade "nigger" jokes were all the rage. Among the white kids, of course. I should write "nigger" "jokes", for those so-called jokes were no laughing matter. They were violent in nature as well as violence in and of themselves.

And my formative years were spent in that culture.

I have deeply ingrained behaviors and impulses which I must watch with vigilance, for even though I knew at a tender age that racism is at best nonsensical, I eventually came to understand that it is violent and deadly.

But cultural conditioning is strong. I can't change what goes on inside my head, and I fear the things I might do or say , should dementia set in (It runs in my family).

However, I do have the ability, and responsibility, not only to avoid passing on my acculturation, but also to teach my children to make the differences I was unable to make.