My son is white and now 20. He has struggled a lot in school but generally always had friends. There were two times when he said something that so upset another boy that that boy no longer wanted to be friends. The second time was when he was about 13 with a mixed race boy that was a couple of years younger than he was and was visiting his Black grandmother down the street from us. I never found out what he said. It just occurred to me that I really should have, for many reasons, asked the grandmother for more details about what happened. However, the grandmother did not seem open to this. I am white. I wonder if this was the reason, and if I should have tried harder to find out what happened. I actually know now that I should have tried. The first child that had ended his friendship with my son for reasons that he would not say was white and a little different culturally and in some ways was more affluent. I did not push his parent to find out more either although she did say that she had tried to find out more from her son but could not. My son had no idea why the White boy had ended the friendship. I didn't ask him if he knew why the Black boy had ended the friendship. We had lived in a predominately Black neighborhood for a couple of years. My son seemed to get along with the other Black children in the neighborhood, and they often visited in our home, and my son visited their homes.
