I believe for most children, at least in my experience, race is less of an issue than as an adult. I grew up in what my mom likes to call a cookie cutter family. My father, mother, older brother, older sister, twin sister and myself all have natural blond hair and bright blue eyes. My father was adopted so I do not know anything about where my father’s family came from, but my mother comes from a family of almost 100 percent Irish. So as you can imagine, I can’t go out in the summer to get the mail without needing sunscreen. Well, not really. I have always been very close to my mother who is a very warm and welcoming person so as a young child I never noticed the skin color of the other kids I played with. To be honest, I can’t remember what any of the kids looked like in my classes. What I do remember is a family a few houses down that I would play with all the time. They were an Asian American family and the mother held a daycare in her own home with her family, so there were always kids to play with. I only started noticing differences as I got older.
Now race wasn’t actually the first difference I noticed about people. When I was seven years old my parents sat my twin sister and I down to explain a condition my father had, called diabetes. They waited this long to tell us because my father had to go into surgery to remove one of his toes. Diabetes is known to cause problems with the feet in particular because blood has trouble reaching this area of the body. Because of his health issues and struggles with diabetes year after year, my father had to use a wheelchair frequently. Now since I saw my father as the funny, outgoing, and hardworking man he had always been, it was weird to me to watch people look at him differently. I guess when some people look at a 6 foot man in a wheel chair, all they see is a wheel chair, but all I saw was my dad. This was a big eye opener for me. I realized that when I look at people I can’t just look at their appearance, I have to look at who they are as a person.
I noticed more issues with race in high school. Although I hung out with people of different backgrounds, there were many people that criticized others because of the color of their skin. I will forever remember the day when a student drove up to school in his pickup truck carrying a confederate flag and a noose. I will never know how some people can have so much hatred for others. As you can imagine the student was not allowed back to the school and how serious the students were hurt.
My older sister, known never to follow what other’s tell her she has to do, started dating her African American boyfriend about 5 years ago. Not being in that situation myself, I can only imagine the issues that have deal with from other people regularly. They have a 2 year old son together named Troy. Now I can’t imagine another human being more beautiful than him. It’s very hard for me to understand how people can have so much hate for a person that I can love so much.
Many times I wish I can go back to when I was young. When life was easy and race wasn’t an issue. Why do people have to formulate opinions about others simply by appearance? I learned young that appearance doesn’t mean anything when it comes to what a person is really like. I may not be able to change how other people judge, but at least I know I give people a chance before I formulate an opinion about them.
