First thing to state, while I can empathize with a person of color in this society (meaning the US, not necessarily the international Mudcat community), I have no personal experience as a person of color.

But I have been one of a very, very small handful of white people at a James Brown concert in Milwaukee in the '60s. I've been the token white in a black owned and managed business (in the early '70s). I've eaten meals at restaurants where all the other patrons (and wait staff) were people of color.

I grew up in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin metropolitan area, but in neighborhoods that were primarily (but not entirely) white. From high school on, I had a substantial number of non-white classmates. I now live in a primarily white state -- New Hampshire -- and just for reasons of proximity, I have more friends and acquaintances who are Hispanic or have Native American (I really like the Canadian term "First Nations") ancestry rather than African-American (or Asian or Near Eastern, for that matter). New Hampshire does have substantial ethnic diversity among Caucasians -- and, believe me, Azizi, white people (who are a pretty diverse group in themselves) can have just as many prejudices or preconceived notions about other groups of white people as they can about people of color. (Maybe more.)

It doesn't do to generalize about anyone. There are plenty of African Americans whose families (or themselves) have emigrated from Africa and are not the descendents of the American slave system. There are white people, such as my family (which emigrated from Germany in the 1850s-1870s) who are not descended from slave holders or even from a society which owned slaves.

We here at Mudcat are bound by a common interest in Anglophone folk songs, traditional songs/chants developed to make work easier (whether on shipboard or in textile work or in plantation fields), blues, and acoustic pop and singer-songwriter songs as well as instrumental music out of these cultures and folklore.

If there are fewer people of color at Mudcat, I think it is more likely because there are fewer people of color interested in white folk music (and in sea shanties, for example, even though there is a strong black influence on shanties) than there are white people interested in the music that have come out of non-white traditions.

Just some of my observations.

Linn