There
was a casual racism in the town I grew up in that allowed for jokes
and name calling but I never saw any kind of segregation or violence.
That could have been because there were only really two races and
the non-white race, Hispanic, was segregated. There was one black
girl in our school and a girl I thought was black that turned out to
be Indian the from India kind. Maybe we were not that racist because
it was not all that possible. Now is the part where I establish
myself as not-racist legit – My best friend in elementary school
was Mexican. Sweet, now I am beyond reproach right? I also thought
that there were some cute Hispanic girls so there is that. I
establish a general ignorance about race relations in the United
States because it so thoroughly blew my mind the constant humming of
racial tension that was just under the surface. My cousin's friend
that I thought was cute was graduating as Valedictorian or
Salutatorian and was speaking at her graduation so we all went. She
read Oh,
the Places You'll Go!'
by Dr. Seuss, which has since become required by law to be read at
graduation as a right of passage.
 |
| It is not a bad book for graduation the first 13 times you hear it and then you start to think maybe people are just mailing it in. |
At the time I had never been to a
graduation and thought it was a pretty cool thing to do. That was not
the thing that drew my attentions however, it was the fact that in
this high school gym filled with maybe couple thousand people there
was no one sitting out of their de
facto
race section. I had never seen anything like it a bleacher full of
black families, a little gap and the Hispanics and then the white
families made up the rest. I searched the crowd and didn't see one
person out of place. I commented on it and my aunt, who is southern
proud, said that was not racist it was just where people felt most
comfortable sitting. I wondered aloud then what would happen if a
black family went and sat in the middle of the white section. She
said they could go sit wherever they pleased. That I thought may be
have been a lie. On my trip I got to see a couple other indications
that miscegenation may not be as free and easy as she claimed.
