With the breakdown of rabid segregation, national attention and government dollars were focused on giving poor black children access to middle-class experiences through programs like Head Start.
In the 1960s, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had passed, many people assumed that the job of raising a black child had become little different from that of raising a white child. To raise black children in the late 1980s is to step behind the veil of pleasantries and euphemisms with which adult Americans, black and white, drape the still-explosive issue of race. "I wouldn't go anywhere that you couldn't go," said my wife.
GROWING UP BLACK SKIN
Our 5-year-old daughter, Regan, who had been silent, suddenly added, "And anyway we couldn't visit you because our skin is brown, right, Momma? But if you want to go, Momma, it's okay. Then he looked at his fair-skinned black mother and said, "I'd bet you could get in there, Mama." His mother said maybe so, but she wouldn't want to because she is proud to be black. I explained to Antonio, my son, that some whites prefer not to talk, eat or play with black people, especially older whites who grew up when segregation was legal and never attended school or worked with people who had black skin.Īntonio strained against his seat belt to look at the large white antebellum building set in what is now a black neighborhood, our neighborhood. Since its opening in 1902, this nursing home for the elderly had never admitted a black man or woman.
My wife, two children and I had stopped for a red light in front of the Masonic and Eastern Star Home. This was the spring of 1987, and we were driving to Grandma's house in Washington. "THEY DON'T let black people in there," I said.
0 kommentar(er)
