I just discovered The American Thinker (What a find!), its article archives, and Albin Sadar's March 31, 2012 article, "Racism is for Losers," which resonated intellectually, made me laugh, and brought back these memories:
Something that used to raise my infant blood pressure with impotent fury was many adults' penchant for admonishing me not to do idiotic things that I would have never thought to do, as when an uncle once ordered severely, "Don't go up that ladder that the roofers left!" I can still feel my silent, seething anger at his assuming that I, a non-dare-devil girl-child with a fear of heights, would scurry up the ladder left leaning against my grandmother's three-story house by the lunching roofers. That feeling returns when I see brochures in church vestibules or on university bulletin boards with titles like "Seminar on Fear of 'the Other,'" "Dialogue on Race," "Youth against Hate," etc., ad nauseam.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties, with "colored" water fountains, adult angst over desegregation, the N-word bandied about, and even "nice" grown-ups talking nervously about whether there might be "nigras" at the Girl Scout camp some of us were getting ready to go to. My parents, whose innate decency and kindness overrode any integration-angst they might have felt -- products of their time that they were -- must be given much credit for my growing up with the self-evident notion that people were important, that their race was not, and that those who thought otherwise were silly at best, small-hearted at worst.
Something that used to raise my infant blood pressure with impotent fury was many adults' penchant for admonishing me not to do idiotic things that I would have never thought to do, as when an uncle once ordered severely, "Don't go up that ladder that the roofers left!" I can still feel my silent, seething anger at his assuming that I, a non-dare-devil girl-child with a fear of heights, would scurry up the ladder left leaning against my grandmother's three-story house by the lunching roofers. That feeling returns when I see brochures in church vestibules or on university bulletin boards with titles like "Seminar on Fear of 'the Other,'" "Dialogue on Race," "Youth against Hate," etc., ad nauseam.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties, with "colored" water fountains, adult angst over desegregation, the N-word bandied about, and even "nice" grown-ups talking nervously about whether there might be "nigras" at the Girl Scout camp some of us were getting ready to go to. My parents, whose innate decency and kindness overrode any integration-angst they might have felt -- products of their time that they were -- must be given much credit for my growing up with the self-evident notion that people were important, that their race was not, and that those who thought otherwise were silly at best, small-hearted at worst.
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