How do we teach our kids tolerance and fraternity with everyone? Despite the yellow journalism reporting police brutality against others every day in the US, I sighed with relief after leaving the flight from Sydney to Soeul, en route to NY, where my four very black kids were seated across the aisle from an elderly Australian couple, behind whom I sat and could overhear some very rough racist comments for the first hour of our journey. Lovely old people with serious hatred for immigrants and coloureds who stared at my PNG kids for hours, with unsettling animosity. Towards the end I spoke to them, blonde to blonde, so to speak, and they were all sweet and patronizing and took me for their carer and asked how I could possibly be related to them....and when we got off that flight I sighed blessed relief. We then flew to NYC where the kids disembarked to black and brown faces speaking many languages (like themselves) and where no one assumed familiairity enough with me to ask me such a personal question as How did those kids become yours?. Whatever faults exist in the USA, it has always been a place of difference, like Papua New Guinea itself, and when we got to Vermont and our little house on Lake Champlain the kids found an American flag, knowing it was Independence Day, and climbed out the roof to find a place to hang it. They have been welcomed warmly by people along the dirt road today who remember my grandparents and their Afro-American friend Walter McGee, from the 20s, who became the first black man to live in these parts at that time.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 02:38:44 +0000
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