Closing In

              I remember the day that Alex Haley changed my childhood. That night long ago in the land of yesteryear sitting on my living room floor staring into the TV watching the man from “reading rainbow” in chains. Awakened to the marvel that people in different countries have different sounding names. Saddened by the fact that what people don’t understand they often try to change. And troubled by the thought that my skin color was linked to a heritage that brought me shame.
                I looked like the bad guys! I hated the fact that I even looked like I was on their side. The oppressors were not the ones with which I identified and thus that movie marked my very young life.

                

                Growing up I knew people of every shape and color – from black to Mexican to Asian; from family to friends – and I loved every last one of them.
                Their differences didn’t scare me and I didn’t find them weird – I thought they were some of the most beautiful people to every have appeared. My parents happily confused as to the type of child they had reared. I never even realized that I was the one considered “socially weird.” Thinking that all people are equal is a moral to which many people find difficult to adhere.

                

             And now I’m all grown and my husband isn’t white. Maybe he’s not black, but his Latin brown is close enough in societies frightened light.
              My children will be mixed, lacking blonde hair and America’s blue eyes; and I often wonder how they’ll be treated in their mother’s countryside.  Speaking a different language and probably accented English, will they be treated differently by the country they share blood with?

                

               Why is this the world we live in? Why is this ignorant bliss something people are willing to sit in.
                No one speaks and no one shrieks as long as the silence holds them steady on their pinnacled mountain peaks.
                It finally hit home. I know it happens, but I thought “this ain’t Chicago.”
                I thought we were the south. I thought we were kin. I thought people had learned to look past one’s skin. So many people unknowingly have blood with black in it.