White Americans Fail to Address Their Family Histories

[vlyons]

5. Here's some of family race history

My grandmother was born in 1881 in Kentucky. She came to Texas when she was 5 in a covered wagon. I remember as a little preschool girk sitting at her dressing and playing with her costume jewelry. On her dresser were photographs of some old black guys. She told me, pointing at the pictures, "that's your cousin So-n-So, and that's your cousin So-n-So," and she would laugh. My parents were horrified. They told me, "No No! You're not any kin to them. Those were slaves freed after the civil war, and then adopted by the family.

Yeah riiiiiight!

My Dad, who was a Dallas cop, was so deeply racist that whenever a black person appeared on TV, he would change the channel. I could tell more stories like those. Suffice it to say that I went to segregated by law public schools in Dallas. It wasn't until I went to college in 1965 at U Tex in Austin that there were black students -- mostly foreign students from Nigeria. My freshman year, there were 20,000 students enrolled, of which 600 were black.