On that note…
As I mentioned in my previous blog, mom used to tell me stories about how segregated her integrated high school was…Remember she was born and raised “Up North” where they didn’t have mandated segregation. However the black students couldn’t swim in the Olympic sized pool because it took too much time to drain and refill the pool for the white kids; separate water fountains and the black students kept to themselves outside of the classroom. And there was plenty of racist taunting and bullying to boot.
Now fast forward fifty years to her high school class reunion. I asked mama how it went and she said it was amazing. She said that at the reunion they were all “just old folks together in a ballroom.” They all greeted each other and smiled at each other even (I’m talking about the whites & blacks) shared tables – which was something they’d have never even considered in 1947.
She said it was as if the old separation of races at Roosevelt High School never existed…
It’s funny to note here that one of my white friends felt the need to “remind me” that we have a long way to go towards correcting racism etc… As if I needed a reminder. My great grand mother was a slave FOOL!!
I have lived my entire life with a plethora of friends from all races and cultures and a huge bunch of white friends who are truly intimate friends and yet I still have that “ole haint” of expectation of racism in the back of my mind…It mutates your soul but it does still exist. I know this. It is part of my life experience.
But today is about love!
Filed under: In the Life of a Diva
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It’s so nice to have you back….regarding race and such…it still is unimaginable to me that it would have been illegal for me to marry my man in OUR GREAT COUNTRY during some of the years I’ve been alive…I would have been shot had I been born much earlier…and still it continues, as we all know….my daughter is not black enough for her boyfriend’s parents; seemingly intellectual people I’ve known for a few years, who’ve never met my blackity-black-black hunk of a man, act like it’s a strange and curious miracle (black boy meets white girl)WHATEVER–it is, but only that I actually married…I remember waking up on the 21st and thinking, “Was that real or just a great fucking movie?”
I hope we can all wake up!! The past cannot be forgotten and it should ALL be taught in school, the truth…and maybe we can learn from it. That was hate and fear. Let this be love for our own sakes. Let this love BE!
1 criollorubi0 said this (January 25, 2009 at 2:24 am)
As everyone rushes to inform me and my BFF Carla reminded me: “a little less than half the country voted against Obama–and I imagine some of them did so for racial reasons, it ain’t over!”
You are dealing with a whole different can of worms with the interracial marriage and the “she ain’t black enough” daughter. OY!!!
Love is all you need.
2 Lynne said this (February 3, 2009 at 2:44 pm)