White people like to pretend that racism doesn’t exist anymore. I was taught, as a child, to not see skin color. We are all the same, I was told. We judge based not on the color of one’s skin, but on the content of their character, ad nauseam. So I tried not to see what was apparent. I constructed a dichotomy in my perception of people; what I saw, and what I was supposed to see. This voluntary blindness blinded me to the truth, that people are different, and people with skin colors other than white have very different experiences of America. It shames me to say that in my youth, I…