nccotus

We are all soldiers in race wars all the world over; but especially in America today.

As a very English little girl growing up in a UK/US family in an all-White American suburb in North Jersey, I had a distorted view of race matters. We marched for Blacks and studied racial prejudice in grade school. We hosted Black scholarship kids in our home. My father was called a communist. Finally, we joined a very laid-back church, which saved me.

There is no Latino culture in Britain and no history of literal enslavement of Blacks. No “n-word.” Alhough Africa was colonized. I don’t know a whole lot about it.

I read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Roots,” all Black-themed, and had a Black girl from Harlem for my first term roommate at boarding school Freshman year.

I grew up among Northern Jersey Jews and then realized I likely was one on my mother’s side!

But, not a single American latino.

Until I have recently been called to welcome my son’s girfriend into my heart which I so now do!

I used to be scared off by the language. I just couldn’t find a way to mesh with it.

I did have a horrific experience with a young Black woman on a psych near here recently who tried to entrap me for some kind of hate crime. Her name was Dom. She tried to get me arrested for looking at her the wrong way. On a psych ward. She stated clearly to me that she hated older white women. I stand up for the rights of geriatric women. If I wasn’t one then, I am now. This person was a dangerous being herself.

I have lived in fear ever since. As if I wasn’t already because of Obama! It was already bad enough!

But, through it all, I had the guts to look up “Hispanic” and “Latino” online and get a litte uderstanding of the landscape of this cultural and political group.

So, through it all I was able to see how the adult woman in me did have serious racist classist issues in an interior way that just never met any test and finally have. I wasn’t evil. Just ignorant, Ignorance IS NOT BLISS. I have been corrected in this regard.

Words do hurt.