BANGOR – Assata Sherrill said her teenage daughter spends the night at her white friends’ houses all the time.

But many of them do not attend sleepovers at the black Sherrill household.

“I want to know why,” Sherrill said to a group gathered at the Peace and Justice Center in Bangor on Sunday. “Not the ‘what would you do in that scenario?’ but why in Maine does this happen?”

“The best answer I can come up with is fear,” offered Roger Stavitz, 57, of Danforth.

Sherrill, who recently was the victim of an apparent racially motivated assault in Bangor, held the first of a series of open forums to discuss and expose race issues at the Peace and Justice Center on Sunday afternoon. Sherrill told Bangor police that three teenage boys had thrown rocks at her and yelled racial slurs, while she was walking her dog on the city waterfront. Bangor police have since charged two male teenagers with disorderly conduct and the state Attorney General’s Office has filed a lawsuit against them under the Maine Civil Rights Act.

Nearly 20 people from a variety of backgrounds, including Somali students from the University of Maine, attended the forum that unearthed emotions of hatred, anger, curiosity and isolation.

Charles Austin, 47, lived in Dexter until recently, when he returned to Rhode Island because of numerous racial attacks against his family. Austin said his children were frequently assaulted in Dexter schools and on his second day in town his car’s windshield was smashed.

“I want to be angry, I want to hate, but I can’t,” Austin said. “I have a daughter who is half-white.”

Austin has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the town of Dexter, claiming that his family was forced to leave because of racism in the community and in the Police Department.

“As blacks continue to bottle [anger], it keeps getting worse and worse,” Austin said. “If this continues, I fear for America.”

Anger became the topic of discussion after two members of the group left the forum, presumably frustrated by the simplicity of conversation. Just before they left, one of the members expressed dismay that in 2007 groups are still addressing the physical differences between blacks and whites, such as skin color and hair texture, rather than finding the root of racial injustices.

“When it comes to job hunting in Maine, I frequently get the attitude ‘If you think you’re going to come up here and get one of our good jobs, you better think again,'” said Josephine Bright. She grew up in Jamaica before moving to New York City and earning a doctorate. Bright has sought numerous faculty positions at the University of Maine in Orono, but has stopped submitting her name for consideration.

“I call it the ‘always have a cousin in the closet,’ because somebody up here always has a cousin or sister or nephew to give a job to instead of you. Minority groups are at a tremendous disadvantage.”

The recent shooting at Virginia Tech and the suicide of Brent Matthews, a Lewiston man who rolled a pig’s head into a mosque, also were mentioned as examples of how the media and society portray victims and aggressors of crimes.

If Seung-Hui Cho had been a black man, Bright said, the media would have branded him an “animal,” yet in contrast the white Columbine shooters were just “two disturbed young men.”

In the case of Matthews, whose federal hate crime charges were dropped in January, one black man in the group said, “If you rolled a pig’s head into a mosque in Detroit, [Mich.] you should hope the police get to you first.”

The next forum on race issues will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 29, at the Peace and Justice Center.