I love to read a good book!!! I rarely read one that helps me realize the blessed circumstances I live in vs. those in different times and places. This novel is a page turner for sure. But this blog is not meant to read as a book review. This novel really made me think about things that I never really thought of the way I did after I read this.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's I wasn't even thought of. My mother still lived in her sheltered white suburban home in Palmdale California, with her Dentist daddy from Utah and her white society mother from Chicago IL. She was a petite brunette, pretty enough to make any man turn when she walked by.
My father a tall 6'4" blond hair, blue eyed all-star athlete in high school lived in his white home with his angelic mother from Blanding UT and his southern daddy from Virginia.
Both LDS households, both upper middle class, well educated and oppurtunities abundant.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's on the other side of the sheltered world my parents lived people were fighting for equality, and people were fighting tooth and nail to keep them in the place their ignorant minds felt these people with their dark colored skin felt they belonged. They claimed seperate but equal, but this claim fooled nobody. "Colored" people got whatever bone was thrown to them by white people. "Colored" people could go to college if they could afford it and have a degree just to work for a white family and shine their silver, and have to use a seperate but far from equal toilet in the cold garage or "out back". They would be beat if they used the wrong bathroom or sat at a lunch counter. A young colored girl's hopes could only reach as far as a "nice" white family to work for instead of one that made her bleach her hands instead of soap before touching their belongings. Ladies that would raise these white children and love them just to them torn from them later and have them call them "Nigger" as adults. Why? Because their skin was darker. They were differnt. Inferior. Less.
Can you only imagine? Have you ever stopped to imagine?
This really wasn't that long ago. 2 of my favorite men on earth are David Brown and Kevin Akins. They are both black men. 1 was born in 1969 and the other in 1970. What were their parents fighting for? Were they fighting to keep food on the table? Were they fighting to make sure their sons would be equal to the son's of the white men they worked for?
As the mom of 2 amazingly gorgeous children whose fathers are black I cannot imagine the racism and prejudiced against someone for having a different color skin. I look at my children an cannot imagine anyone on this earth not seeing that they are simply that, children. Children that are loved just as their own. My children have caramel colored skin, curious brown eyes, and curly brown hair. They are tall, my daughter like her dad's family my son like my dad's family. My heritage is not as liberal as my own soul on this issue. On both my mother's side as my father's side I have deep southern roots. But this is not something I can wrap my brain around. I cannot fathom treating someone different because they are different. Diversity is such a beautiful gift, why are peple so afraid of it?
Imagine each race using a different restroom in today's society. How absord would that be?
