For a major part of my life I have worked in a predominantly African American community and have been quite involved in those communities. I also felt very vested in the economic development of those areas. Never did I ever consider myself as being racist.

For those of you that don’t know, I am Caucasian. Though I consider myself a “person” rather than a “color.” I also look at people as people too. Some people are just more “tan” than others and that’s ok with me.  I don’t feel that I treat anyone differently and I surely wasn’t raised that way.

With “racism” being more in the forefront over the last few years I had written a piece about a friend of mine who is African American. Floyd, and I had lunch together for years and years almost every day. If we didn’t have lunch, at some point in our day we touched base via phone. Floyd had a small business in Gary and with both of us being marketing geniuses we discussed business, marketing and Northwest Indiana every day.

Because of the racism issue, I wanted to write a piece about our relationship and I guess show how much of a good person I was. I titled the piece “My Black Friend.” I didn’t think anything of it at the time. When I wrote it we hadn’t spoken in a while but I still considered him my friend. No one really commented about it after I wrote it. But life went on and more and more the issue of race kept coming up in the news. During that time Floyd seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. He didn’t call, I left a few messages with his wife and on his answering machine but no response. Well one day I guess my light bulb finally went off and I realized that I shouldn’t have titled the piece the way that I did. Because Floyd had always been “My Friend” without any other labels.

I’m sorry if I offended you Floyd it wasn’t intentional. Also, your standing reservation still stands if your hungry!