[Tommy]

Following some troubling racial incidents in the Air Force in the early seventies, the higher ups mandated racial sensitivity training for everyone service wide. It consisted of a day long program that attempted to show that the majority's culture wasn't the only culture that mattered. One portion attempted to demonstrate institutional racism by administering an IQ test that most white people failed. It included terms most familiar to inner city black people. For example, it asked about the jheri curl. That turned out to be a hair style popular in black communities. I took the training just before being reassigned to another base. .... When I arrived at my new base, I soon found myself scheduled for the same training. I protested that I had already done it, but there was no notation in my records, so I had to go again. When it came time for the 20 question institutional racism test, the best score by another white person was five correct. The best score by a black person was thirteen. I got nineteen correct. The instructor had a hard time making his point about institutional racism, and I never mentioned that I had seen the test just two month earlier.