Part Two.
I think I’d like to continue by elaborating a bit more on where I’m coming from. The Irish, English, French Canadian side of me comes from my mother. The African and American Indian side of me from my father. Both of them were involved in various groups such as Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties and seventies. My father’s heart was (and is) in history, and my mother’s political science.
As I talk with more of my friends about their parents I realize that mine are different from most. They took the rhetoric of equality seriously. I never perceived them as being unequal. Any important decision was made together, and they would include me as much as they could. I’m not saying they are saints, but I would be hard pressed indeed to site an example of either one being sexist or racist towards the other. Also, important to my development was a lack of ageism in the house hold as well. So, somehow they where able to manipulate reality around me to the point that I didn’t really realize prejudice was a living a breathing thing until latter then most. Not only was I oblivious to many things in the way that children are, but I now feel that they very vocabulary to express these concepts of prejudice was missing to a large existent in my house hold as I grew up. Add on top of this that I was home educated after 1st grade, and we always lived in neighborhoods where either I was the only American (graduate housing is mostly international) or the neighbors were either truly color blind, or kept their views to themselves. You might begin to understand how odd most of the world seems to me.
So this upbringing along with other events in life led me to have certain values and beliefs. At the top of the list is that I truly believe that all life is equal. Full stop, period. It causes me no shortage of moral and ethical dilemmas on any given day, but in the interest of disclosure I think it’s only fair to warn any who should chose to read further this is where I’m operating from.
As I talk with more of my friends about their parents I realize that mine are different from most. They took the rhetoric of equality seriously. I never perceived them as being unequal. Any important decision was made together, and they would include me as much as they could. I’m not saying they are saints, but I would be hard pressed indeed to site an example of either one being sexist or racist towards the other. Also, important to my development was a lack of ageism in the house hold as well. So, somehow they where able to manipulate reality around me to the point that I didn’t really realize prejudice was a living a breathing thing until latter then most. Not only was I oblivious to many things in the way that children are, but I now feel that they very vocabulary to express these concepts of prejudice was missing to a large existent in my house hold as I grew up. Add on top of this that I was home educated after 1st grade, and we always lived in neighborhoods where either I was the only American (graduate housing is mostly international) or the neighbors were either truly color blind, or kept their views to themselves. You might begin to understand how odd most of the world seems to me.
So this upbringing along with other events in life led me to have certain values and beliefs. At the top of the list is that I truly believe that all life is equal. Full stop, period. It causes me no shortage of moral and ethical dilemmas on any given day, but in the interest of disclosure I think it’s only fair to warn any who should chose to read further this is where I’m operating from.