IBARW

[sobelle]

After reading other journals and comments in the blog against racism, and after almost leaving huge comments here and there, I decided to just plop it all out here.

I am an older white woman who grew up in the American south during Jim Crow laws and pre-civil rights, seeing such insidious and oft times horribly violent racism and bigotry... as a child I grew up wondering what "colored" water was, why there were no blacks in the diners we stopped to eat in.... being confused when a older black man would step off the sidewalk when my Gramma and I passed by (and being told by my Gramma to hush when I told him there was room enough for him on the sidewalk too... that there were people who would hurt him if he accepted my invitation)

I was the oldest child of the oldest child, and because of that accident of birth, there were still people around who had recollections and remembrances from their parents and older relatives of the times during and after the war... and as such was raised with their stories of the war between the states... complete with tales of death and destruction and suffering... I grew up wondering how a past way of life that should have disappeared, fought at terrible cost, brother again brother, neighbor against neighbor through that most un-civil of wars... and yet the hatred of some of the descendants of those defeated manifested itself in such continuing hatred towards any and all who were not white...

I grew up with knowledge of such atrocities against a people whose only apparent offense was that they were not white. I heard stories of murder and mayhem that would trump most any of the horror movies I've seen...

I swore that I would leave when I was old enough and never ever come back.

Now all these years later, I am back (to care for my Mom and Gramma) and to see (in this university town) a more evolved cosmopolitan approach to life. My sons, still on the west coast, both are married to women of color... and perhaps their babies will be mocha colored.

Recently my Gramma, while telling me stories of her youth, took a moment to share some of my own forgotten childish philosophies with me. She said that I would tell her that someday all this hate and anger would disappear because people would grow up and fall in love with their own true loves and that all the races of the world would mix and turn us into a beautiful people the color of milk and coffee...

She told me that it would be a long, long time until that could come to pass but that she thought it was a good idea too... but warned me that I shouldn't talk that way around (white) strangers because there were many who wouldn't like it and might hurt me.

From "those" whites I grew up being told that I needed to learn "my place".

Looking now, from the distance of years passed, I know that bigotry and racism knows no ownership from whites yet it still baffles me that peoples of all color can find something in each other to hate... light skin vs dark skin, religion/sect against religion/sect, tribe against tribe... without a doubt, an imperfect world filled with most imperfect people.

I do, however, have hope that as this electronic world offers a colorless society, that we can, with continued communication, take another step towards a world where our color carries no notice...