Black students were often in the racial majority in my classrooms. I was well-aware that they spoke, dressed, and behaved differently from me.
I used to teach at a majority-minority school where, like this author, I was the only white person in the room (or one of the few). It makes me incredibly sad to think about how many of the white teachers at this school would discuss how the student's "different" behavior was something to be inherently corrected- what I now know is, something they saw as too non-white to be okay.