25 cents' worth of abuse ...

"City of Brotherly Love." What a difficult standard to live up to. I thought that race relations were the same pretty much everywhere in North America, but I'm slowly discovering that our cousins to the south have an altogether different relationship with one another.

As I was walking to the DMV this morning, I happened to walk past someone who, while fiddling with a pocketful of change, dropped a quarter, and as it fell it started to roll away on its edge rapidly. Quite naturally, I leaned down and grabbed it before it rolled into the street. Nothing noteworthy so far. Except when I turned around to had it back to its owner. Here's where the learning begins.

Apparently, the Philadelphia way of saying "Why thank you, young man" goes something like "What the fuck you doin' touchin' my shit?" I stood there completely amazed, and a little amused, actually, as this same person demanded I throw the quarter back down. This big black guy was actually screaming at me for helping him out. And I would have chalked it up to him being an exceptional nut if it weren't for the fact that, in my few days here in Philadelphia, it's started to dawn on me that whites and blacks tend to stay apart, out of some commonly acknowledged need to keep a distance.

Maybe there's more to this, and it'll only become apparent after a few weeks here. But somehow, I can't help but to think that after two years at the whitest campus in the nation (save perhaps for BYU), I might have a wrong impression of how blacks and whites actually interact in this country.