Growing up, I was a social pariah. All the white kids would beat on me and rob me and treat me like shit. I was ostracized in most every place I went before self confidence took over at the end of High school and I just figured out how to play their game and win, why it was vital for me fight back against a bully you were doomed to be beaten unconscious by. 
The only people who ever treated me with respect and acceptance were black kids, Latino kids. Maybe they identified with me in some way, or just felt pity when they saw me getting pushed around yet again. Whatever the case, they accepted me and treated me as an equal. Me, a clueless whiteboy who tended to fight back and lose, every time. Over the years, these young men became my best friends. I never made any attempt to clothe myself in black aligned fashion or music, I just took my time, and they helped me to grow, become someone admirable. 
When I was older they took me to strange, wild house parties, painstakingly taught me how to express myself with dance. How to be unafraid in a crowd. How to become.
I remember walking through the kitchen one day as my mother prepared a cake. “Why is it”, she asked “that your only friends are black.?” She was so nonchalant, yet her voice somehow maintained This strange air of deep disappointment. I was stunned, speechless, more by the stupidity of it than anything. She’d seen me come home with bruises and blood more times than I could’ve counted. She knew the score. Why wasn’t she rejoicing in the fact that I’d finally found a group of souls who accepted me as I was - Gawky, often poorly dressed, Unpopular ND ignorant of trends.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to to reply with, so I chose a simple opposite: “Mom, why is it that yours are all White? Can’t you find any black or Hispanic people worth your time?” Inside, I’d made a leap to define not-white and white human beings as two opposing ends of some absurd spectrum. I’d never really thought about this before, strange as that sounds.

I left before she could muster up an answer, and while I still visit her once in a while, I’ve yet to walk through that kitchen again, nor eat a meal prepared within it. I say this as metaphor, or course.

I’m sure I’m just as guilty of Aversive Behavior as the article implies, but I truly don’t remember feeling the ‘otherness’ of varying ethnic backgrounds until it was laid out before me like a hunter’s catch. in that moment. Perhaps I was living in a fantasy world, or perhaps a life of social exclusion had never equipped me with the s same cultural ‘software’ as my colleagues.

Either way, a lot changed in that moment and I was resentful of it for years to come.