Ninety-nine percent of the time, NIOT’s Continuing Conversations on Race are considered confidential. For the special session called to discuss the Ferguson situation, everyone present voted to welcome a reporter, Linda Arntzenius, who wrote a wonderful account of the evening:

People are talking in Ferguson. They are talking in Chicago. And they are talking in Princeton. After the August 24 rally protesting the fatal shooting by a white police officer of the unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the organization Not in Our Town (NIOT) offered concerned locals a chance to continue to speak about racism last Thursday at the Princeton Public Library.

NIOT’s Linda Oppenheim, an industrial relations librarian at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, welcomed about 25 participants to the library… A poster showed an enlarged version of the recent cartoon by Ben Sargent, titled “Still Two Americas,” depicting two identical situations of young boys going outside to play, each saying: “I’m goin’ out, Mom!” One kid is white. the other is black. In the case of the white kid, Mom replies: “Put on your jacket.” In the case of the black kid, Mom says: “Put on your jacket, keep your hands in sight at all times, don’t make any sudden moves, keep your mouth shut around police, don’t run, don’t wear a hoodie, don’t give them an excuse to hurt you, don’t …”

Click here for the full text of the Town Topics article.