Rant #2,175: Colours

With all of the nonsense that goes on on Facebook that I described yesterday, there are often glimmers of hope that the social media network can be a useful tool for discussion, if people give other people the chance to voice their viewpoints without getting completely hysterical if their viewpoint doesn't happen to match yours.

Whew, that was a long sentence!

Anyway, on Facebook yesterday. somebody brought up an interesting question: When did you first see race? When did you first see that the color of one's skin was different than yours? And does society perpetuate the question of race through its laws and actions, making it virtually impossible to not factor in race into just about any equation?

These questions were good ones, so I decided to reply. At this point, for some people, anything I say is going to ridiculed and ripped apart, but I decided long ago that if that is the way you feel about what I say, that is your problem, not mine.

I brought up an incident--too strong a word is "incident," but for lack of a better word, I will stay with it--that happened when I was probably seven or eight years old, but I will get back to that one later.

The more I thought about it, the more I dug even deeper into my past to answer that question. I did not change my answer then, but I will post my definitive answer now.

I think the first time I might have seen that people could be different than me--not really that their "race" could be different, I was certainly too young to understand that--was when I was about five years old, and my family and I lived in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, New York, a pretty hardscrabble community of the time of mainly blue collar, but many white collar families.

I was a very active kid, always running around with my friends, and one day, we noticed that the basement of the building I lived in had its door open, which was very unusual.

A year or two earlier, the glue-sniffing craze literally began right there in the basement of my building, and we used to see teens led out of there by the cops, caught doing this stuff to themselves.

Since that time, the basement was always closed, so kids had no place to hide when sniffing glue.

Anyway, the basement was open, and my friends and I saw that there was a family in there: a mom, a dad, and at least three or four kids.

And they looked different than us. I don't know if I perceived it as such, but they were different than us, because their skin color was, well, darker than ours.

They were squatters, homeless, had nowhere else to go. I don't think I realized that at the time, all I knew was that they were living in the basement of our building, on the sly, only to emerge when they thought no one would see them.

And the baby's name, I swear to you, was Swee' Pea.

That is all I knew at the time. When you are five years old, you don't realize, or understand. much else.

About a year or two later, right before we moved from the community to South Jamaica, Queens, in the brand new mixed-community development known as Rochdale Village, a family moved into our community in Kew Gardens Hills that we knew was different, as the kids spoke no English.

I was now seven years old, a little more cognizant of my surroundings, but even though the kids had a darker skin than I did, I doubt I really got that part of the equation.

The kids--who I suspect all these years later were Hispanic and perhaps Puerto Rican--did not speak English, and I seem to remember we helped them to understand the language when we played together--I think there was a boy and girl probably around my age in that family.

Jump forward a few months, and my family moved to a brand new, very interesting community that rose right in the middle of one of the longest standing, most famous ethnic communities in the U.S.

Rochdale Village was a project that rose on ruins of the old Jamaica Race Track. It was designed as a mixed-race community, with, at least at the beginning of its existence, probably a 75 percent white/25 percent black racial mix, which replicated the New York City union rolls at the time, or the prime element that just about all of the applicants had to have in order to apply for the right to live there, which was generated by a lottery.

The project brought not only housing to the community, but retail, schools, and a mixed racial makeup that this area had not seen in decades.

Some people loved it, some people hated it, but there were no gates on the community, so the existing community could avail themselves of all the good the development brought to that community if they so desired.

Anyway, I was probably seven or eight, the place was new, buildings were literally going up all around me and my friends and my family. That was certainly a magic time of my life, and I made many, many friends there, a few of which I still have today, more than 50 years later.

I believe I was in Rochdale Village Day Camp, so I must have been eight years old or so. We went to the beach--Jones, Rye, somewhere else, I don't really remember--and we were putting on our bathing suits and getting ready for swimming.

We also took out our sun tan lotions, putting it all over our bodies so we would not get burned.

As I was getting ready, I saw my friend putting the lotion on his body as much as I did.

His skin was as dark as could be--in parallel to mine, which was as white as could be.

I remember saying to him, "Why do you need sun tan lotion? Your skin is so dark."

His reply: "We burn too," and that was that.

Very innocent. No racial overtones involved. Nothing nefarious about the question or the answer.

But looking back, that was probably the very first time that I saw race, saw a real difference, at least in skin color, in people, and that not everyone was like me.

It is amazing what you can absorb and understand at eight years old that you couldn't previously get when you were five years old, but yes, those three years made the difference.

And yes, society does perpetuate the question of race through its various actions.

Race should not permeate anything we do, but that is pretty much a pollyans-ish wish that simply cannot happen in a society where numerous races are, in the best case scenario, work, live and play together.

Case in point is the hairbrained scheme of New York City Mayor deBlasio to get rid of the specialized schools in the city, the elite schools that educated a segment of the student population that is absolutely brilliant.

He does not like the racial makeup of the student body of these schools--which today is predominantly Asian--so to force more "inclusion," he either wants to lessen the entrance requirement for certain segments of the student population or make them open and free schools with open enrollment, effectively destroying these schools and what they set out to do.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, but again, this is beingdriven by racial prejudice on deBlasio's part, even though he and his backers don't see it that way.

Whatever the case, situations like this, that impact our children, do put the onus on all of us in our society, where race--and the differences we supposedly have--is the main focus of seemingly everything.

This is just plain wrong.

We are all Americans, and yes, there are differences between all of us, and yes, these should be celebrated, but the main goal--I guess you can say that it is something akin to "live long and prosper"--is the same for all of us, whether we are white, black, yellow, brown, green, or purple.

And yes, I often do wonder about little Swee' Pea, probably the first black person I ever saw, even though I did not realize it.

I also think that today's kids get hit with the race "ticket" way earlier than my generation did, so that five year olds today probably "get it" better than seven year old kids did in my generation.

And I don't know if that is good, or bad.

Ponder that over the weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.