<p>Peacefulmom is so right I am not sure I’ve read a better book recently on the African American experience than the Warmth of Other Suns. A fantastic read. </p>
<p>The Watts riots in 1965 sparked a lot of racial unrest in my upstate NY city. My mother was terrified and spent nights sitting on our front porch with a baseball bat until my father took us out of town for a week. We lived in the ghetto district and many of my playmates were black, but still she was terrified. </p>
<p>I remember my parents criticizing the government and not the blacks for the unrest.</p>
<p>As to bevhill’s comments, one of my homebound church members recently told me of a train trip she took to Baltimore to visit her husband, who was stationed there. She was sitting in the waiting room at the train station for a couple of hours wondering what might have held him up, and eventually discovered that he was over in the whites only waiting room wondering the same about her. For over two hours she’d never noticed that everyone else in the room was black!</p>
<p>One of the churches I serve now had one pastor who served from 1946 to 2007. He had made a pledge to the congregation that the above woman belongs to that no one of color would ever step foot in the congregation. Well, three years ago a 70-something black woman joined the congregation. That day four of the other older ladies asked her out for lunch and drove her up to the nursing home where the retired pastor now lives to introduce them!</p>
<p>My aunt down south told me about something that happened last summer. She went to her H’s very white family reunion, and a couple of black women approached them. My aunt said they looked kind of defiant and hesitant at the same time. They walked up to the people at the family reunion, and one of them announced loudly that she was part of the family too, because her ggrandmother as a slave had had children by their ggrandfather. There was this awkward silence, then my aunt said one of the white family members said “well, I always heard those rumors and thought they were probably true. Welcome to the family. Would you like some cole slaw?” My aunt said the black women appeared surprised, then smiled a lot, and my aunt said a great time was had by all. Boy have some things changed from the 60s. (Unfortunately some things haven’t.)</p>
<p>The Christmas parades in downtown Orlando, Fl always had a white Santa on a float at end of parade…right after him was a black Santa on his own float. This was still going on in the 1960s!</p>
<p>Hayden, you have a cool aunt. I remember reading that when DNA evidence finally confirmed that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings, some white Jefferson descendants refused to meed their black relatives.Guess reality was just too much for them. </p>
<p>Thanks, katliamom, I think she’s pretty cool, too. You should hear the story of my aunt and uncle’s middle of the night confrontation with a pack of KKK members! </p>
<p>Several years ago she was awarded the governor’s medal for her work in civil rights and was featured on the front page of the state newspaper. I’m very proud of her. I’m very proud of how far our country has come.</p>
<p>I grew up not far from Elizabeth, NJ, in a suburban college town of some mixed ethnicity. I was born in 1952. We were encouraged to prove our equitable attitude toward blacks. One thing I could never figure out was why my father, whose own mother expressed racist views, was more disturbed by the Italian population. We were raised to be respectful to to all and my sibs and I had black friends. My father thought that Italians all smelled of garlic. Come to think of it, my father avoided any food with garlic. Maybe he was a vampire! </p>
<p>My mother, in her 1960’s effort to prove that she was not prejudiced against blacks, made an extra effort when a black child knocked on our door to sell something. If white kids knocked, she conducted the business of Girl Scout cookies, or whatever, briefly and did not invite the child in. Black kids were invited in and she chatted them up. I recall lots of eye rolling between my sibs as we thought Mom was being absurdly friendly to negate any impression of racism.</p>
<p>I recall a summer vacation in Maine, where we visited a penny candy shop. A kid’s paradise! We each had a dime to spend, which seemed like a fortune. Ten pieces of candy to choose! We were excited, until the woman ahead of us ordered her candy. She wanted some pieces of a jellied candy, oblong, black, sugar covered licorice. The woman asked for ■■■■■■■ toes.” The store clerk looked confused. I had no idea what she was asking for, but watched in horror as she pointed and repeated her request. My sibs and I exchanged wide eyed glances. I remember not really enjoying the candy I chose. </p>
<p>A friend of mine, who happens to be an elderly African American gentleman, told me a story about when UMiss paid him (& a few others) to go to college in Texas instead of in Mississippi.</p>
<p>My grandparents moved to an interracial neighborhood in Seattle during WWll from a tiny farming community in the Midwest.
I don’t think they had ever seen African Americans before, but my grandfather worked along side them building airplanes and my grandmother worked for a Japanese grocer until his family was taken to Tule Lake.
They referred to African Americans as “colored”. Which sounded less offensive than what the Japanese were called.</p>
<p>One of my college professors, Fawn Brodie, wrote the first about Thomas Jefferson and the children. A few of tehe kids went to California where they became the first African American legislators. This branch had no problem being interviewed. The family that went to New York became white and Park Avenue types: they refused to be interviewed. And they threaatened legal action if they were included in the book.</p>
<p>^I didn’t find the “test” particularly useful, since they didn’t describe any methodology for arriving at their conclusions. It seems like they just made stuff up.</p>
<p>Fawn Brodie
I knew I recognized that name. She wrote " No man knows my history".
I haven’t taken the test, but I know I have biases.
I was raped and beaten by a black man, although it’s been decades ago now. However, I still feel a hesitation whenever I approach a black man I don’t know well that resembles my assailant in height and facial features.</p>
<p>In some cases I think it depends on where you grew up. My husband was in Georgia in the 60’s and remembers the marches and segregation. While I grew up in a small town in Michigan and my best friend was AA. I really don’t recall anyone treating her or family any differently than anyone else. The American Indians in the nearby town that lived on the reservation however that was a whole different story… To this day there are still people who up there who treat them poorly. DH moved to that town in the 1970’s. He recalls going to high school and the Indians being beat up for no reason. He said it was a lot like how AA kids were treated in Atlanta just the race changed…</p>
<p>My mother grew up in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s. She was born 2 years before Brown v. Board, but, the schools in her town weren’t integrated until 1968 or 69, just before she graduated from high school.</p>
<p>We spent most of my childhood pretty far from Mississippi, but moved to a neighborhing state in the early 90s. I can still remember when she and my grandmother had a big fight at that point over whether my mother was going to join her hometown garden club (now that she lived relatively close). My mother was uncomfortable joining an organization that was, at that time, still all white (this has since changed).</p>
<p>Emerald, we all have our biases, some rooted deeply in the fabric of the society around us, some formed by personal experience. But there’s a difference between having and recognizing (and trying to deal with) a bias, and blindly accepting biases thrown at us by others, and perpetuated by society, just because.</p>
<p>I was born in 1951 and lived in NC for 23 years. My dh has asked me if I remember the segregated drinking fountains and I don’t . We had black neighbors that my folks thought the world of where we lived until I was 7, in a rural setting. When we moved to a town and I became older, I was definitely aware of the segregated neighborhoods and yes, we called the other area “colored town”. Ugh. Well, anyway, the schools integrated in 1964, Fall, beginning of my eighth grade year. I already knew some of the girls from Church get togethers and I made it a point to go right up to them and say “hello”. I realize now that our minister had arranged those socials that summer for this reason. We were Methodist and my new friend was Cynthia and she was the daughter of the other church’s minister. We never had any issues in our town. It was extremely difficult to watch the news over the next several years. My parents never uttered a word “for” or “against”, my parents never used the “n” word. I think I will talk to my mom next time I’m with her and try to get more on her thoughts during that time period.</p>
<p>Didn’t mean to imply the segregated drinking fountains didn’t exist, only that I don’t remember them.</p>
<p>I had a weird take on this as a child. It may sound like a cliché but my best friends were black. We went to a talented and gifted private school. I never saw or heard anything negative about black people at school. I envied the houses of the black and white kids who lived in the city (Detroit) because the houses had so much more character. </p>
<p>My grandparents all lived in the city and I liked their neighborhoods better too, with the tree lined streets and the shops around the corner. Then all those disappeared and it became dangerous and three people were killed at the playground we’d walk to and then my grandmother became the last white person in her entire neighborhood. We convinced her to move when she collapsed at the bus stop - and was taken care of by black people, of course.</p>
<p>I knew that racism was real. I could see it writ large on TV, with police dogs and fire hoses turned on people who only wanted the right to vote. And the articulateness of black leaders like Ralph Abernathy - had to mention someone other than MLK because he wasn’t the only one by a long shot.</p>
<p>And I knew that Detroit was racist too. My dad would take me with him to the hospitals downtown and he’d explain how the neighborhoods had changed and how people were poor and so on. </p>
<p>But I separated all that from the black kids I knew (and loved). It’s an odd thing but racism in Detroit was always different from racism where I live now in Boston. In Detroit, people spoke of “whites” and “blacks” as groups and that meant you could know individual whites and blacks and be friends. In Boston, racism was personal, an outgrowth of the city’s tribal mentality in which you belonged to this group and thus I have to hate you because of your group. I found Boston racism when I moved here to be more vicious and more like what I experienced in the South where my relatives lived. </p>
<p>I remember when the tenor changed. The Black Panthers. Black Power. The movie The Butler captured that change very well. But in context it mirrored the changes going on in white America too, with the anti-war protests and students being murdered by the National Guard and the drug culture and so on. And the black movement split up too. </p>
<p>And I remember how quickly my view of the world shifted as I moved into white schools. There was 1 black kid, older than me. I became aware for the first time that I was a minority in a Christian, largely Catholic area. I started to hear racial and religious and ethnic slurs. It’s very weird to hear someone curse out your religion and then turn and say “Not meaning you” to me. You know why I was with those people? Because they were the people around me. That’s the root of a lot of casual racism. </p>
<p>In my area, the real racial minorities were Asians. A few Koreans, including a good friend. I have no idea how they coped. I never thought about it. To be honest, I never realized they were of a different race and had different customs because I’d walk into these Catholic houses that felt equally or more alien. </p>
<p>We had a maid. I’d talk to her about Mississippi, where she was from. She talked about it like my grandmother talked about WWI in Russia: with great reluctance and no detail because she said it wasn’t something she wanted to remember. </p>
<p>^^ your story reminds me of a friend of my daughters ( white) who had attended the same private elementary school. Their school was pretty representative of the city, although a bit more diverse.
She attended a parochial middle school, and picked up negative observations about minorities that she didn’t have before.</p>
<p>I tried that test from page one and had no result. I also found it very creepy (one of the male images) and strange that the only two “pleasant” male images had them shirtless and doing push ups (apparently). I wouldn’t trust that test at all!</p>
<p>However, my Dad grew up in New Orleans and once, while he was with his troop of Boy Scouts, an older African American man stepped aside to let them all pass by on the sidewalk. No big deal, I would do that myself. But the scout master said later, “now there’s a Colored gentleman who knows his place” and my Dad said that that was when he realized he was anti-segregation. He would have been about 10 and this would have been the early 1940’s. Kids usually have a strong sense of what is fair and what is not. </p>
<p>This is a great thread! Both of my parents are from a very small town in Alabama, and I used to spend my summers there with my grandmother and great grandmother. Its sad, because the town is STILL segregated. One of my grandmothers still lives there. I learned a lot of history because I grew up with all four of my great grandmothers, with the last one passing when I was in my thirties. She was a midwife, and she was still delivering babies until the late seventies. Its funny because the town told her to stop when I was 9 or so, but we recently found birth records in the house we tore down, and they were dated in the late 70’s. Even then the local hospital didnt want to give Blacks service, so my great grandmother pretty much delivered every Black person in this town. Sometimes I get so mad at some of the voting laws that are passed because neither of my grandmothers have birth certificates, yet some think it is so easy to get an id. I am in my late forties, both of my grandmothers are still living, so I get to find out a lot of history, and how things were. I remember, my mom being a little girl in the fifties and she was riding the bus up north, and they made her sit on the steps of the bus, so that all the whites could have seats. She had to ride like that until they reached Birmingham and a seat opened. I also remember in the middle 70s that my great grandmother tried to withdraw money out of the bank and they wouldnt give it to her, because they wanted to know how she got that much money. We had to drive down to Alabama, and go to the bank and threaten them to get her money out. </p>