Stanley Fisher, a black man, very rudely. He explains that the details are blurry, but remembers that the incident made him feel a racist attitude. He not only experiences racism through white people, but through his own black culture. Gates learns of his mother's hatred toward white people and in some sense follows her attitude as he gets older. The Coleman family dinners even have their own sort of segregation because the women would serve the men in the main room, and then eat together in the kitchen. His experiences of racism against himself began in the school setting. As people get older, they develop a cognitive prejudice where they reject an individual based on their membership in a certain category. Linda's prejudice against Gates is cognitive and not emotional, which is more of a personal bias. When Gates begins middle to high school, his white friends socially distant themselves from him and are less willing to establish a relationship with him or members of racial groups other than their own. This attitude starts with the news of race riots in Los Angeles. Gates begins to "experience that strange combination of power and powerlessness that you feel when the actions of another black person affect your own life, simply because you both are black. I realized that the actions of people I did not know had become my responsibility-(Gates, 1994, p.149-150).
Black people who experience the stage of immersion reject all non-black values and immerse themselves in the black culture. Gates never fully experiences the immersion stage to an extent. He begins to engage himself in the all-black culture by joining the church and ultimately being saved, but he never actually rejects the white culture. In high school, he starts a group with three other black boys called the Fearsome Four and " stopped being a Negro, turned black, and grew the first Afro in Piedmont, West Virginia"(Gates, 1994, p.
