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Throw Back Thursday - Standing Up To The Crowd In Junior High, there was a teacher who was black. I was not in her class but some the students would leave "Black Cow" suckers on her desk. I know they gave her a hard time and Mr. C would go into the class to straighten them out. I was not Ms. Popularity as a so I frequently went the opposite direction as the crowd. By the time I reached High School, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. I started asking my grandparents and great grandparents a lot of tough questions. My Step Grandfather owned a janitorial business and frequently called his employees his n*ggers. Men with long hair were f*gs. He REALLY LOVED my Jewish Boyfriend despite the fact that my biological grandfather was Jewish. My Step Granddaddy would have been REALLY ESTASTIC if he ever met my Jamaican boyfriend. Once I reached HIgh Sch00l, I started tutoring Special Ed students. The teacher was a black woman. I remember using the term Negro and she corrected me saying the proper term is Black. Several of the student tutors decided to do a walk-out because she was busting them for smoking in the restrooms or at least that was the excuse. I didn't smoke and I certainly wasn't going to go along with the group with the hopes of gaining acceptance and popularity. I was the only one that walked into her classroom to help tutor the special ed students. I was surprised how gracious she was when the students including my sister finally did come back to the class. She didn't give them all a bunch of "F's"  Abracadabra  |
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Years later, I moved into a poor neighborhood with my bOys. When I went to get my older s0n registered at the nearby sch00L - I found out that my blond haired son was being bused to a school on the beach courtesy of desegregation. Abracadabra
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I didn't grow up seeing any difference in a person's skin color, probably because of my Mom. Raised in a mixed neighborhood, even called one of my Mom's black friends my aunt. Yes, they were really close friends in a time when that was looked down on, but at that time, I was unaware of how prejudice people were. I never realized how much people of different colors hated each other until I was 12 years old. If my black friends went to a white neighborhood with me, we were attacked, if I went to the black neighborhoods with them, we were attacked. We couldn't hang out together in public anymore, not back then. As time moved forward and we became young adults, I saw less and less of the hate. We could sit down in a restaurant together, go to movies, concerts, parks, etc... thanks to the Civil Rights movement. Now I look at the world and it seems like we are going backwards instead of forward. Am I wrong?
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