I logged onto Facebook last night and found this link on a friend's post...I watched and was stunned at my ignorance...that this behavior is both necessary and effective...that I had no understanding that it is required education...that the whiteness of my skin has protected me from so much pain and abuse...
I was raised by Southerners...both of my parents were from southeast Tennessee...my first recognition about racism that I recall occurred there...I used to walk down to the corner gas station with my grandpa...who would buy me a "co'cola" from a refrigerated cooler...the old-fashined kind that doesn't exist today...short, wide, red and emblazoned with the Coca Cola logo...the kind with bars that kept the rows of bottles aligned and separated...the kind that seemed to keep things icy cold...a nickel in the slot and the bar opened by magic allowing a single coke to be dispensed down a narrow track...
One day, we had gone somewhere in the car...so instead of walking to the corner, Grandpa decided we would drive there instead...we took a route I had never traveled...it led by a public swimming pool...loving to swim I cried out "please, please can we go swimming?"...Grandpa said we could...but added "not at that pool"..."that pool," he informed me, "is for colored people only"...
I was about eight years old at the time...and from California...where my public pool was open to one and all...I swam every day of every summer with my friends and classmates...I had no attention at all on what race, color, religion or creed they were...and the idea that there were different pools for different colors of people had never occurred to me before that fateful day...it was in such stark contrast to my experience...
I was to learn more and more about racism as time went by...foolishly, until last week, I thought my learning days were over...Anne Hathaway sums up my self-imposed ignorance this way...
"We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news, yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day."
Filtering the eclipse...a metaphor for finding a way to see what you want to see...
it wan't until I saw that video yesterday...and remembered Anne's comment...that I fully realized just how big my blinders about racism are...how long the road to equality really is...how very few steps we have collectively taken down that road so far...and how much of the change that is required is up to me...