I Have a Dream

I still remember vividly the first time I heard the story of my parent's moving to North Carolina and my mother offering the movers a glass of lemonade.  Granted I was little, and I probably remember the story all wrong, but the gist of it was this - they had worked like dogs in the hot, hot weather and she offered them a cold drink.  Both of the movers accepted the drink gladly, but one drank his inside, while the other insisted on drinking his outside.  Why?  Because one of the movers was white and one was black.  And even though this was POST segregation, it was still the south, and black folks didn't fraternize with white folks, period.

Being a lifelong Yankee, my mother was taken aback when it happened - as all of us kids were upon hearing the story.  Not that predjudice and racism doesn't exist in New England, because certainly it does everywhere...but the social component that determined who could do what, when and where, and with whom, was a completely foreign concept to me.

Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and we celebrated by tearing apart our mudroom...I mean, we celebrated by spending some time talking about  Dr. King and what he stood for and how he, and others like him, helped change the world we live in for the better. 

For Christmas, Santa brought each of the children a book that I'm sure he chose especially because we have moved to a wonderfully diverse community that has sparked some interesting questions and concerns by some of the little people in our household.  I read through them with the children over the weekend.

Jack recieved "One World, One Day" by Barbara Kerley.  It's a photographic journey through one day as it's lived by many different children from all over the world.  I found myself getting lost looking up where each and every photograph came from - everywhere from Texas to Russia to Bolivia to Myanmar to Nigeria.  Beautiful pictures and a mesmerizing way in which she's interwoven it all.
Molly was given "Shades of People" by Shelley Rotner and Sheila Kelly.  We have spent a very, VERY long time, painstakingly going through each shade from cream, to ivory, to cocoa, to coffee and everything in between.  Figuring out who we know that has skin in that exact shade and which shade is just like us and "would you call this coffee or cinnamon, Mommy?"  They are FASCINATED by the variety of children in the book.  But to be honest, I think Ben and Molly are most fascinated by the names of colors assigned to each "shade".  And they both want to be ROSY, just like the little boy on page four who clearly has been running around in the sunshine for too long and needs a good drink of water!

Ben received "Global Babies" by the Global Fund for Children.  It features beautiful babies from all over the world.  My kids just want to know where this one got his cool hat.  And can they have one too?




Marc would probably say "Who the heck cares? People are people!  Who cares if they're all white or not all white, or pink or purple or striped."  But I think it's kind of awesome that our kids are growing up in a place where first names like Prakash, Gustavo, Shreyant, Navya and Mauricio and last names like Sciackitano, Vanderheyden, Rachapalli and Fahoum roll off their tongues (though mom may need some remedial assistance!)

Segregation was abolished decades ago - institutional segregation that is.  But social and economic and geographic segregation still persist.  All one has to do is look at Maine or Vermont or the South Side of Chicago for proof.   If my kids can grow up, at least for a time, in a place where some of those other barriers to desegregation are absent, where they get to experience firsthand what Dr. King helped win for them with hard work, perserverance and eventually his own life, then we are all better for it. 

As Molly wrote on her artwork from school last week...
"I hav ai dreem that evreebutee gesulong."