I was born in Marin County, CA in 1953, and lived there in San Anselmo and Novato. In 1964 my mother, sister and I moved to Oregon to live with my maternal grandmother. I never saw any "negroes" until I was in Junior High School. There were entertainers on television, now and then, and my grandmother always commented on how talented "they" were.

The Civil Rights "hullaballoo" (my granny's word for it) was less of a controversy than "beatniks, hippies and free love" in our household. I know my grandmother had some issues arising from her upbringing in Kansas, but my mother and my older sister were very liberal. I had no understanding of why Granny would use such a hateful word as "nigger" in a very casual manner. Whenever my mother or sister would rebuke her for this, her huffy response would invariably be: "Oh, that's right, they're our "chocolate brown brothers." Other than this verbal indication that blacks (and THAT was considered to be a distasteful word to my mother) were somehow different, there didn't seem to be much of an issue about the races in our household.

Once while I was in my early teens, my grandmother made a point of telling me not to go wandering about after school, and to catch the bus home right away, because "the Job Corps was in town." I didn't understand the reference, so I asked her what she meant. She said, "They're all blacks." And? She simply told me to stay at school until the bus brought me home. Curious. Interestingly enough, most of the other kids that waited for buses also hung out at school instead of drifting over to the Dairy Queen, which was our usual practice. I guess many of us received the same cautions.

When the bus passed through town, I could see a small group of young black men at the Dairy Queen, and I couldn't see any reason to be afraid of them. I don't know what I was expecting, particularly from Granny's vague onimous warning , but nothing lept out at me. They were the only customers there at the time. Leave it to a small fishing port town in Oregon to foster the concept of "us" (white people) and "them."

My father was NOT the liberal person my mother had been. He used a variety of slurs and epithets when referring to anyone that wasn't a WASP. He even thought Masons and members of the Church of Religious Science were "cultists." He respected "Jews" as "good business men as long as you're not looking for a break." I wonder what that meant? Maybe folks who happened to be Jewish didn't care for the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" method of doing business that my father practiced? You know, that "good ole boys" network. He even once made a sarcastic remark about my mother having participated in Job's Daughter's activities as a young woman.

I don't know why he was this way, either. I didn't recall him being like that, when I was very young. Was it visible, then? Did it just not manifest itself because there wasn't much of a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic population in the cities in which we'd lived during those years.

In any case, I am very grateful that the mores my mother attempted to instill in her daughters, while less memorable recollections, have stuck with me. I really don't know if persons of color who don't happen to know me personally would think much of what I've written here. I may very well have a long way to go before being "color-blind." But I'd like to think that I am.