We're Not Born Racist.

When I was in the fifth grade, my best friend was Jeffrey Vaden. He lived in the next house over from our neighbor. His father was in the Air Force. We played together. We stayed overnight at each other's houses. We ate together. We hung out at school together as much as we could, since he was in a different class.

Our next door neighbor had moved out, and the house was vacant for several months. I was sitting out on the sidewalk doing whatever eleven-year-olds do on a Saturday. An older couple came out of the vacant house, and the man came down the sidewalk toward me and stopped. I will never forget this. He said, "Son, can you tell me if there are coloreds living in that house?" He waved in the general direction of Jeffrey's house. I had no idea what he was talking about. He seemed very grumpy. I told him I didn't know, meaning I didn't know what he was talking about. He walked off in a huff. I asked my mother about it later, and she explained. I remember feeling bad about it. The older couple didn't buy the house. I was glad. It was my first experience with racism.

During the Summer after sixth grade, Jeffrey's dad got new orders and they moved away. Like all kids, I felt bad about it, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.

When I was in the eighth grade, the politicians decided that we needed busing and integration. The junior high school I went to, Hill Junior High, was lilly white, mostly Jewish kids. Half of the kids who had gone there in the seventh grade went to a junior high school across town, and half of the kids from that school came to Hill. As you can imagine, parents and kids from neither school were very happy about it. Forced busing might just have been one of the dumbest sociology experiments ever.

I made friends with one of the kids from the other school. His name was also Jeffrey. We had several classes together, and we hung out at lunch time. Obviously, we didn't get to hang out after school. When I say that the other school was across town, I mean it was way across town. I started noticing that some of the other kids started giving him trouble. I didn't know what it was about. I could tell it bothered him a lot. Then, one day we were hanging around before class and he started walking toward a group of kids from his neighborhood. I followed, thinking we were just going to hang out with his friends. As we got closer, I could see his friends giving him the stink eye. Suddenly he turned and accused me of spitting on him and started punching me in the chest. I retreated. He resumed walking over to his friends. Several of them patted him on the back. He and I never spoke again. It was my second experience with racism.

We're not born hating other people because of their skin color. I don't think I even noticed Jeffrey's brown skin until the incident with the old man. We seem to thrive on coming up with dumb reasons to hate one another.

We need a parent to slap the shit out of us and tell us to knock it off.