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In reply to the discussion: White DUers: Tell Your Stories [View all]Chemisse
(30,802 posts)Last edited Sun May 6, 2018, 06:13 PM - Edit history (1)
But when I was 13, I was a runaway and a "hippie" living in Boston. I was staying at a place in a predominantly black section of Boston, which was known to be dangerous.
One night I went to a friend's apartment for whatever ridiculous reason a kid would wander around in a scary neighborhood after dark. He wasn't there but three guys who knew him were there. They were young black men. I had seen one of them before and had spurned an advance from him. I'm pretty sure he was a drug connection for the mostly-white hippie community I was living in.
One of them pulled out a gun and told me to take off my clothes. The others sat silent and watched. I was terrified, and frankly, at the age of 13, I would have preferred to be killed than raped. So I sat there frozen, crying.
I was incredibly fortunate that the owner of the apartment came home right at that time. The gun was quickly hidden away and I ran out of the apartment. I can only imagine how my life would have been haunted if they had raped me.
There were other examples of me being aggressively approached by groups of black men in that neighborhood at night, but I led a charmed life in those years that I was a young girl out on my own, and nothing bad happened to me. And certainly there were plenty of white men who were happy to try and exploit me as well.
Is this an example of racial discrimination or targeting? Would they have done the same to a black girl of that age? Was it simply because I was young and powerless and not related to being white? I have no way to know.