"I cannot in good conscience support such discrimination."

So I told my landlady almost a month ago that I would be moving out on July 2nd - well over a month's notice. Now there's no lease on this apartment - there's not even a written agreement. Everything is verbal. She has a 2nd floor apartment and a 3rd floor apartment, but she essentially rents each room separately. My housemate Brenda has been here about 4 years and had 3 or 4 roommates. I myself found the place by checking postings on craigslist. Zophie, the landlady, is a nice older lady, and I've enjoyed living here, so I offered to help them find a renter by posting the room on craigslist. They agreed.

I had oringally posted the ad with Brenda's email and Zophie's number, but since most people seemed to be emailing Brenda (who wasn't communicating with Zophie) rather than calling, and Zophie was annoyed with Brenda for other reasons, Zophie requested that I take Brenda's email off the posting and just put up the phone number for herself and her son's cell.

Well, since there's no lease and it's not like Brenda is responsible for the 2nd 1/2 of the rent if the room doesn't get rented, I figured that was pretty reasonable. So I did so. But I guess people were still responding to the old posting w/ Brenda's email, or else she'd already arranged things, because Thursday night a very nice black lady comes and looks at the apartment. She had made the contact through Brenda, who apparently hadn't informed Zophie. So the potential renter sees Zophie in the yard as she comes up and introduces herself.

The next morning as I'm getting ready for work, Zophie and her son come up to talk to me. Brenda had already left for work. Basically Zophie expressed her frustration with Brenda, saying that it was not Brenda's place to rent, and no matter how nice that "colored" lady was, she wasn't going to rent to her. So far I just figured Zophie's reason was because she was upset Brenda hadn't gone through her, which I could understand. But then Zophie launches into this discussion about how it's her apartment and she wants to rent, and how these two "colored" girls at one point came and looked at the apartment, and they said they liked it and they wanted it, and Zophie was like "what going to do?" and so "I double the rent." And apparently after Zophie doubled the rent on the girls, they *still* wanted the apartment. So Zophie told them it wasn't going to be ready or something, in order to not have to rent to them.

At a couple points Zophie's son tried to interrupt her, and say something more vague, like "It's just better if mother chooses, because there are all kinds of people who might rent."

Anyway nothing much happened of the conversation; I told them I would repost the ad that day on my lunch break. But the more I thought about the conversation the more it bothered me. I mean, was there really any other way to interpret what she was saying? Her first statement about not renting to the "colored" lady that came thursday to look at the apartment I could excuse away as being annoyance with Brenda rather than prejudice, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to explain the doubling the rent story.

So I wrote Zophie a brief note, saying that due to her two statements ...........and....... I felt that she was discriminating against African Americans, and that such discrimination was against the law, and that I was under no obligation to help her, and could not in good conscience support such discrimination, and therefore I would not be posting the ad online. I dropped the note in Zophie's mailbox immediately before leaving for the weekend - I admit I was a bit of a chicken and didn't want to confront or be confronted by Zophie.

I've had pangs of doubt this weekend when I think about it, a little anxiety in wondering about Zophie's reaction, I guess because I just don't want to believe what I heard. I want to have misinterpreted something. But I don't think I did. The only explanation I can come up with for Zophie's behaviour relies on another ethnic type-casting on my part: Zophie is a Polish immigrant, still speaks with a very heavy accent, so perhaps in Poland their population is not as heterogenous and therefore they weren't taught that racial prejudices are bad.

I feel a little embarrassed about that explanation - as reasonable as it seems - because it seems like what I'm trying to do is say "she's not really an American, American's aren't bigoted like that." Which as much as we'd like it to be true, isn't entirely true. I can think of born-and-bred red blood Americans at home who make the comment "There are blacks, and then there are niggers." Which I suppose is a rather offensive way of trying to say that it's about how somebody acts (and maybe dresses) rather than the color of the skin . . . but it still has some racial prejudice in there.

So yeah, sort of a rather unpleasant look at the problems still facing our country today.