General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]tavernier
(12,375 posts)My grandparents, both mom and dads side, had never seen a person of color. I was in the Baltics visiting a few years back and there were none. A young lady of mixed race waited on me in a day side trip to Helsinki and that was it. My recent DNA confirmed that I was 99 % from the region of Latvia and 1% Estonia. Dad did once tell me of an Estonian aunt of his. I am probably the first person in my family ever to see a person of color, including Asian and Indian and American Indian and African, although there were travelers, or gypsies as the Latvians called them, in fairly large numbers throughout Eastern Europe.
Obviously I dont come from slave owners, but thats not the point. My father was a racist even though he had never known any people of color before he stepped off that boat at age 22. It was 1950 and America was in its height of racial tensions. All he knew about negroes, the accepted term in those days, was that they looked different. We would drive to Buffalo and he would ride through the slums and complained that the people
lived in broken down tenements and werent interested in making something of themselves. But he had no idea of the struggles and the brutality these people had just so recently endured, and the continuing inequality they suffered daily, at work, at school, at the simple act of entering a bathroom.
So, things have improved. At school I was educated about the civil war, about slavery, and I had black friends and teachers, and these days my grandchildren date black and white boyfriends and girlfriends and no one thinks much about it.
But it will remain a struggle, Im certain, until we either all blend into one color, or into one understanding... That we are all of the same human race.