I didn’t grow up asking such questions. I was raised in a community in New Orleans where my parents taught me that the beauty of our people’s historical struggle for freedom and equality was that it ultimately spoke to the oneness of all human beings. Sounds of Blackness’s “Africa to America”; Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”: These were the albums I was raised on. These are what taught me to develop an identity that was secure in itself and which did not require prejudging others.

Though I never heard the words “white privilege” until I got to college, I encountered racism. A college anthropology professor assumed I shouldn’t be held to the same standard as my white peers. I’ve been called a “house slave” for standing up against anti-Semitism. I’ve been called the N-word.

But by and large the violent hatred on display in Virginia couldn’t be further from my personal experiences with white people. Every school I attended in New Orleans was either predominately black or multicultural. So I grew up around black kids and white kids and Hispanic kids and Jewish kids and Muslim kids and Asian kids. I was and still am able to navigate diverse cultural spaces with ease as a black woman — not because I assume that these people aren’t prejudiced toward me, but because if they are, I was raised not to respond in kind.

I was taught that if someone white makes assumptions about me or my people, the proper response is not to go around making assumptions about them. That creates a downward spiral into hatred fueled by ignorance. The proper response to prejudice is not to treat our close-minded neighbors as though they weren’t human; that is how they have treated us. It is precisely because I love myself that I refuse to hate another.

I remember the day my parents taught me this lesson. I was 10 years old and they’d taken me and my sisters to an exhibit in Mississippi called “Without Sanctuary.” It was a memorial to the thousands of black men and women who were lynched in the Jim Crow South. I remember sobbing that night. I was filled with rage that I hadn’t yet felt before.