[Homestead] Newsweek -- "A one point race" ?

SJC indexer at localnet.com
Fri Oct 24 00:58:25 EDT 2008


EarthNSky wrote:
> In a way, it is voluntary 
> segregation, blacks returning to city where they are the majority and 
> rejecting integrated cities.  Culturally, it makes perfect sense.  They 
> have roots here, family here, and even the food has soul. ;)
>   
Makes perfect sense to me.  I grew up in a very distinct lifestyle from 
that of the rest of the country.  I left at 15 in order to go to high 
school and live "like everybody else".  To this day, despite the fact I 
left voluntarily, I am never more comfortable and relaxed than where the 
people speak "right", whether in English or my native language, where 
the food is somehow more familiar than that I've been eating for the 
last 50 years, where the social customs seem to be so "right" (and both 
human/humane compared to what I see on a daily basis now), where the 
clothing and hairstyles/cuts are so familiar it has drawn tears 
sometimes when I've gone to visit and momentarily had to remind myself 
that it was just a visit......I've often thought that on many levels I'd 
like to be living with or near "my people" again.  It is, in fact, one 
of the reasons I've decided to relocate in the next few years:  to be 
closer to an often much-maligned (by neighbors, media, just about 
anybody at one time or another) group of people.  We all like something 
that makes us comfortable.

Reminds me of what happened right after forced school segregations in 
the north.  Many people hated it, not just whites, but of both races.  
No one changed their social allegiances, nor for that matter, activities.

If you have a dozen red chickens and bring in a white one, she's a 
goner.  Same thing if the colors are reversed.  Have a dozen white, or 
black, or whatever color, chickens and bring in one that looks just like 
them, she'll eventually be one of them, albeit at the bottom of the 
pecking order.  Sometimes I wonder just how different we humans are.  
I'm definitely one of the most tolerant (of personal differences of all 
kinds) people in my neighborhood, but I'm also the one who is "out of 
the water" here.  Once in a while (admittedly it's usually when I feel 
provoked by someone/something that went on) I catch myself wondering if 
I came by that tolerance by way of wanting not to be shut out....I 
didn't do such deliberately, but it may be that I've done in nevertheless. 

I did, however, very deliberately teach my kids tolerance for people and 
their differences, and I'd say 2 of them are very tolerant, the other 
about at the level of his mother.  One of my kids has ever since he left 
home lived, by choice, where there were few Caucasians and no native 
English-speakers.  He is now contemplating moving back to where more 
folks are multilingual, and recently he noted that one of the stresses 
of the past 20 years has been that wherever he's lived he's occasionally 
wished for "somebody who thinks like I do" and when queried about that 
comment a few months ago, it turns out to be that what he's missing is 
the verbal expression of a value system, certain child-rearing practices 
he doesn't see where he is/has been, other things that basically to him 
say "home", "my people"......

So it seems a natural thing to me to want to be with one's "own kind of 
people".

Susan Jane, in Maine, where she just spent 2 days with visitors, old 
friends,  from New York City, which is always fun and exhausting.  If I 
had to move at that pace I'd have been dead long ago!



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