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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Well I am confused Susan; I thought you were German?  It's none of my 
business, but I could have sworn that you said, once, that German was your 
first language.  Who malighns Germans? Well..........bobford


--- On Thu, 10/23/08, SJC <indexer AT localnet.com> wrote:

> From: SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>
> Subject: Re: [Homestead] Newsweek -- "A one point race" ?
> To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Date: Thursday, October 23, 2008, 10:58 PM
> 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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