In order to be spared from a trip back to prison the parolee had to provide information leading to a bigger catch before the evening ended. Because of the constant influx of prostitutes, users, and other dealers that wasn’t hard to do. In fact, it was a small time heroin dealer – a friend of the parolee’s - that intervened and led the agent to an amount of heroin sufficient to divert his attention from the handicapped felon.

I had hoped it would only be a few minutes that I was left there in the crack house while the agent went to check out the lead. But I sat through an entire HBO movie while the crack heads drank and smoked everything in sight – but not any crack as they assumed I was an agent. I couldn’t figure out how they managed to pay the cable bill while the doors were falling off the hinges and the cockroaches crawled up the walls.

By the time the evening ended the drug agent had what he wanted. And by the time I finished telling the story to the “colleague” he had what he wanted; namely, grounds to accuse me of racism. “Why didn’t you just burn a cross in his yard, Adams,” the enlightened professor quipped.

But the suggestion that we were racists wrongly targeting the crack addict suffered a fatal flaw; namely, that the addict was white. At no point in the story did I mention the man’s race. But my “colleague” heard the word “crack” and assumed – incorrectly assumed – that all crack addicts are black.

So it seems that unconscious racism is not just real but thriving on the campus of UNCW. Whether you’re talking about the Chancellor or just a tenured professor, the roots of racism run deep. And its occasional revelation does nothing to diminish the arrogance of the unconscious racist. It only increases his guilt and his zeal to engage in racial Scapegoating.

And, once the cat is out of the bag, the rest is done with full and conscious awareness.