I am so sorry for your experience, and there is so much truth in this article.

I adopted my first dog from the Berkeley Humane society, a mostly German Shepherd mutt who had been abused by her prior owner. She was a great dog, except she always barked at black people. I was mortified. I had so many idiotic white friends who said she must’ve been abused by someone black. Um…no! If that was the case, she would have cowered. She must’ve been abused by a racist asshole, because her barking response was from seeing a person who was not within her normal experience of what human beings looked like, and unless specifically trained for protection, most dog barking is out of fear (and yes to the people who have commented that the dogs are picking up on the owner’s fear, and no to those who say dogs don’t see race — they absolutely distinguish between dark skin and light skin).

So I knew I had to do something about it. Luckily, I was in a grad department that had several students from Africa, so I asked if it would be okay for me to bring my dog into the office a few times a week (it was Berkeley, so, yeah…) I then made sure the dog was present whenever we worked together, ate together, hung out on the lawn. I had already trained her on the command “Visit,” which is something that has to be taught to most abused dogs, since they shy away from everyone, so we just did a lot of Visit commands with my classmates, who knew why I was doing it and were cool with it (thank God, because they didn’t have to be, this was my problem not theirs).

It didn’t take long before the dog was completely comfortable around black people. Which is great, because after graduating, I moved to a wonderfully integrated part of Oakland and most of my neighbors had darker skin than mine, and she was very friendly with all of them. Whew!

But it took training. White people cannot deny that if there are no black people in your life, your dog might see them as something to fear, and that’s on you to fix.