First off, please understand that this comment is
sort of on topic but is in
NO WAY an accusation or any other type of statement toward Biggy. It has nothing to do with Biggy. It's just something I got to thinking about.
My mother grew up in Springfield, MA. In her neighborhood, you could be an Irish Catholic (like her), an Italian Catholic, or a Polish Catholic. She told me that she didn't even meet her first black person until she was married. She described shaking hands with this couple, a guy my Dad worked with and his wife. She was rather awed by the whole experience.
She also had a collection of "true facts" as they existed in the '50s that would make the youth of today drop their jaws. All babies were born white and it took them three days to turn black, so "colored" mothers always rejected their babies at birth until they turned "colored." Jews had tails. She told me all of this with a straight face and no particular consciousness of racism. She was just repeating what she had been told.
Then she got out in the world and started to meet people who were "different." She was surprised to discover that everything she'd been told growing up was wrong. Very, very wrong. The only items from my father's tour in Vietnam that he displayed were placques given to him by "his men." Most of those men were black. On their coffee table was a cannon sculpture that was hand crafted by a couple of his black sergeants. Whenever my father was away from home, a couple of black guys would show up at the door making sure my mother was all right and didn't need any groceries or anything.
We are all influenced by our experiences and the more experiences we have, the more accurate a picture we have of people who are "different." If you've only met one person of a certain skin color or ethnic group, and this person was a bastard, you could form the opinion that *all* people of that group are bastards. If you've met a hundred people from that group, you have a much more accurate and balanced picture.
My favorite story about my mother and her collection of "true facts" still has to be the time my future brother-in-law, the Israeli Jew, was coming for a visit. She stopped dead in the kitchen, horror struck. There was bacon in the refrigerator. She was totally convinced that if a Jew walked into a house with bacon in it he'd have some kind of horrific biochemical reaction. She didn't appreciate my youngest sister collapsing in laughter against the kitchen counter one bit.
Just some idle thoughts on a Wednesday morning....
