color-wise

What are these words?

Robel
Tyrikius
Israr
Cah’Juan
Yomar
Lizdy

Without knowing, I might guess they’re the names of some unknown countries located anywhere but North America. But as it happens these were some of the kindergartners in the class I subbed for the other day. Interestingly, the class comprised an accurate ethnic snapshot of my town: maybe 60% white, 25% black, 10% Hispanic, 5% Asian.

Growing up in a predominantly white town in the 60s (meaning, there were NO discernible blacks living within Wenonah’s proper tony borders), we had no idea about blacks. Oh sure, we’d see them in the supermarket, or sometimes driving by in cars, but we didn’t know where they came from. They were very mysterious. We later learned they lived in Jericho, right across the road from Wenonah, and we talked about Jericho in hushed tones. It seemed odd even then that one road cleanly separated white from black.

Then some black kids joined the party. They moved to Wenonah, but they lived on the farthestmost street in town: the street right next to Jericho. We weren’t quite sure what to make of them at first. They were a novelty, which made them immediately popular. And they had 60s-era, whitebread names: Bruce, Mike, and Sheila.

In a totally white town, we could have given these kids a headache. But after the novelty wore off, their color simply didn’t seem to matter, right through high school and beyond.

Nowadays it seems like, hard as we try, color still does matter. Kids are brought up embracing their culture of origin, and rightly so. But sometimes kids are the unfortunate victims of bad or absent parenting, perhaps falling under the influence of their ne’er-do-well peers, and color becomes a divisive issue that stays with them.

So when Remy spouted off the “N-“ word the other day in school, we all had something to learn. More later.