04/07/2021 at 10:25 AM
Posted by Kevin Edward White
By Casey Chalk, New Oxford Review, April 2021
Casey Chalk, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is a contributor to The American Conservative and The Federalist.
While a student at the University of Virginia, I had many arresting and confusing moments trying to understand the black experience in America. I once witnessed several eight- and nine-year-old black children, whom I knew personally from an inner-city tutoring program, loudly curse at and harass a white police officer driving through their neighborhood. Another time I called the home of a black student-athlete at Charlottesville High School whom I coached and mentored, only to learn from his grandmother that he had abruptly decided to move to Georgia to live with his unemployed and seemingly uninterested mother. Then there was the frequency with which it was difficult even to get a hold of black kids I tutored or coached — their phones, I learned, were often disconnected for failing to pay the bill.