Growing up in Montana during the Vietnam era, watching protest marches and then the marches for equal rights, later morphing into footage of riots and looting—in Montana that all seemed so far removed… I did see and was aware of tremendous discrimination toward the American Indian students. They were consistently bullied and harassed. In Montana, and sometimes across the country, the issue of race is often equated with Blacks and no other racial group (generally speaking). And I have heard many a Montanan say we don’t have problems with discrimination in Montana—mainly because there is a minority of non-Caucasians in Montana.
The interesting aspect of Geoffry Davis’s interview is that he is a black man who learned to fish from his dad, and now has a passion for fly fishing. In one part of the interview, he mentions the process of knocking on a landowner’s door to request access to waterways for fishing. He passes over the responses of the landowner other than to mention an often-startled reception. What he does discuss is his wife’s worry about his safety. And unfortunately, the worry is not about snakes, or bears, or twisted ankles. It made real to me that same story of young, especially black men being targeted for simply going about what in a non-black we deem as normal activity—jogging or running, being rowdy, just being out after dark, or being somewhere untypical.
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