On a homeschool e-list I'm on, someone asked about how we deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Here's my response, which I thought I'd post here too:

On Friday I went to New Seasons. You know how there are always people out there with petitions to sign? Well, when I pulled up in the parking lot I thought someone had left their baby in a cart in front of the store. But it was a man in a wheelchair. Full grown. About....I don't think he would have even been 2 feet tall if he stood up. His head was a very significant part of his body weight--maybe even 50%. He was by the exit door and it took me the whole time I was in the store to come to grips with facing him and talking with him. I always want to look at the disabled as just regular people, as full human beings, and I'm usually successful. And in the end I was successful. I went out there and spoke with this man about the issues he was petitioning for and signed his petitions. When I got home I discussed it with my kids. They took a very "you tried, mom, and so you weren't bad" attitude.

I also talked with my family about an article in the newspaper a couple of months ago. It wasn't even a news item, but a feature story. It was about a white man who got jumped by a group of black people. It went out of it's way to get the message across: you should be afraid of these people. It talked about how the man is now afraid to walk home from work. Now, we just moved here from San Francisco in December, and that article would *never* have flown in the San Francisco newspaper. But in a way, I feel good that we live in a community where we can help to change attitudes. How's that for putting a positive spin on it? ;-)

I also recognize that racism (and all those other "isms" you mentioned) are a latent part of me. I was brought up with many of those attitudes--they were a part of the values of the small town I grew up in. Some things are buried so deeply that I'm sure I'll never dig them out. Others come to the surface every now and then and I deal with them one by one. One I dealt with a couple of years ago was the fear of walking past groups of people of another ethnicity from myself. I realized that I was taught to be afraid, in the small central California town I grew up in, of groups of Latinos. The less they'd integrated into white society, the more I should be afraid of them. I told myself to cut it out--after all, how many times have I been hurt by any of these groups? Exactly zero.

It is the fear that keeps us separated.