One woman’s lament: My neighbors made me a racist

Cathy Salustri, who lives with her dog, Madison, didn’t talk to her friend and neighbor about race until her article was published. She didn’t know what kind of reaction the story would provoke. “There’s this gray area no one wants to talk about,” she says.

Cathy Salustri lives in St. Petersburg’s Bartlett Park, a predominantly black neighborhood. The only white woman on her block, she moved here two years ago, against her real estate agent’s advice. Now she’s ready to sell and move to a safer neighborhood.

ST. PETERSBURG - Cathy Salustri was typing without thinking. She was mad and she needed to get the words out. What spilled across her computer screen would eventually land on the front page of a Gulfport newspaper and spark Internet debate around the bay area. But that night in her living room, doubt filled her mind. Why did I write something stupid like that? Do I feel this way? I can’t possibly feel this way. The words on the screen did not lie:

I’m a white woman living in a black neighborhood, and I’m turning into a racist because of it.

She won’t use racial epithets. She doesn’t go around waving Confederate flags. She had to look up the word “racism” to see if it applied to her:

The belief that race accounts for differences in human ability or character.

She decided it probably does.

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Source:
St. Petersberg Times