I invite white supremacy apologists to campus. Here's why | Zachary Wood

As a black man, I don’t need to be protected from offensive ideas. I’d rather hear them for myself — and challenge them

“Do black people come from apes?” a high school friend of mine asked, looking me in the eye. His dad had told him about Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve, which links intelligence to race and class in America. “You know, black people are always good at four things,” my friend continued, “running, jumping, stealing, and shooting.”

At the elite private school I attended, which took two hours to get to by public transportation, I sometimes heard these types of comments. These same students would call the neighborhood I grew up in poor, and though it was dangerous and considered by some to be one of the city’s rougher areas, it was where my father worked harder than anyone I’d ever met. So when race came up, either subtly or overtly, his image was the one I carried of my neighborhood and my blackness. “Zach, why are black people so athletic?” they asked me.

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