![]() Many see it as hate, but most people on the inside consider it okay because it is lightly sugar-coated. It is insidious how humans sometimes treat the other. In these discussions, the idea of the other emerges. In my book, Apparent Faith, I dealt with some topics like tribalism, nationalism, and how Christianity united with the Empire. I am quite sure it is also where I picked up some unpleasant habits like using the N-word and telling jokes about Gay and Black people. It was the conservative, evangelical school where I learned to steal and cuss and chew tobacco. The neighborhood was mostly White, especially when we started attending a private school in fourth grade. He also wore product in his hair that smelled like strawberries.īut, in third grade, we migrated back to the suburbs. When the older children would try to pick on us, he would slap them and then run until the recess bell rang. My first crush was on a Native American girl there, and my best friends were an Irish kid who looked like Howdy Doody and a Black kid who could outrun all the fourth graders. We went to an elementary school that was truly diverse. It was somewhere around 1970, and I just remember that there was negative energy about the issue, but I do not recall anything specific.Īt my next school, in second grade, we lived closer to the inner city. Every day, buses would show up with people who looked different than me. My earliest memories are from kindergarten and first grade where I attended a school that had forced integration. I wore blackface in a Junior/Senior play, but that is not where my story begins. So just like before, allow me to tell my story that hopefully will resonate with you, and you can identify with where I am now. ![]() To a large degree, I still feel this way, but I am not going to let it stop me from moving forward. I realized that I was upset about the right thing, but I did not have enough understanding to communicate it well in writing. Whatever I encountered, caused me to reflect on my understanding. Because I was in the middle of deconstruction, it did not bother me much because I realized that ALL my new understandings made my old tribes uncomfortable. Some just silently walked away and some of them confronted me directly. ![]() While there, I walked in two Black Lives Matter rallies and started to get more vocal on social media. Spurred by George Floyd’s murder by police, I took a train from Philadelphia to Washington DC, while I was working in Pennsylvania.
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