He described Vallejo as having once been “a hard-working, redneck kind of a blue-collar town,” and he reiterated that race did not factor into his perceptions of the city. “As far as I’m concerned, I grew up in this town and I have a lot of friends that are all different nationalities. But bad is bad.”

“Are the bad people usually a certain race?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Mostly, what makes the trouble is the gangbangers, and in this town you got blacks, you got Mexicans and you got Asians. You got all three of them. You look around, you see the gang tags. And you’re a pretty hip cat, you know what’s up. And those are the people that cause the problems generally — in every community, not just here.”

As I pressed him further, Mr. Hatfield said he did believe most of the troublemakers in Vallejo were people of color, but he again wanted me to know that he was not a racist.

“Some of my oldest and dearest friends are black guys,” he insisted.

Still, he said later that growing up around a lot of nonwhite people here “gave me a negative attitude toward certain individuals and certain racial groups.”

I found that most people in Vallejo interacted quite comfortably across racial lines and were accepting of one another, more so than in much of the rest of the United States. Several black people told me, for instance, that they did not feel profiled anywhere they went in town, something I certainly do not hear in most other parts of the country to which I travel.

Yet some residents here openly throw around negative stereotypes of people of different races because their social circles include people of all races. They say this means that their sentiments do not come from a hateful place. Even though I am black and have dreadlocks, residents here did not shy away from honestly discussing with me racial issues that many people around the country might be uncomfortable addressing.