Things That Make Me Feel Old...

I wasn’t around back in the early 1960’s, yet looking back, I have to say that even during my lifetime, society has come a long way when it comes to accepting people of different ethnic backgrounds.

I grew up in a mostly White and Hispanic neighbourhood, and it sort of shocks me now to think of the way things were when I was in first grade. The school I went to for Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade had only about two Black students attending it, and although I often talked to both of those kids, a lot of the other White students didn’t. In fact, I even remember a few White kids saying some really condescending things to me about the fact that I was friends with the Black students.

Additionally, the White kids I went to school with weren’t much more accepting of the Hispanic students than they were of the African-American students. Again, I felt like I talked to the Hispanic kids more than my White friends did. And although the cafeteria wasn’t necessarily supposed to be segregated, there were always two tables at which first grade White students sat, two tables at which second grade White students sat, and a table in-between where the Hispanic kids of both grades sat. I remember one time when I decided to sit with the Hispanic students for lunch, and afterward, one of my White friends kept acting like there was something wrong with me.

The fact that seven-year-old children had such prejudiced attitudes toward certain groups only about fourteen years ago obviously means that their parents had racist values that the kids were picking up at home. I remember one especially prejudiced first grader refused to colour a page of a colouring book that showed people wearing sombreros and when I asked her why, she said it was because that page of the book was “for Spanish kids only”. I just can’t understand why the hell anyone would have, at any point in history, had conversations about their hateful beliefs about people of other ethnicities in front of their first grade child. Actually, what probably perplexes me the most about these memories now is that I can’t even tell whether these things occurred because this was back before we had a Black President, or whether I just happened to live in an unusually closed-minded neighbourhood.