I wanted to say something about my own views of race and my family. I'm a suburb kid and grew up largely in white suburban areas far outside of big cities. I can't recall ever being in school with anyone of another race than white until I was in high school. The town I went to high school in was a rich enclave outside of Cleveland, in between Cleveland and Akron, the sort of town that has a town green imitating New England with a clocktower and lots of zoning to make sure no houses got built that didn't follow the standard (there was a Japanese style house that was built near downtown and the town made the owners build a fence around it to hide it; we didn't even have a McDonalds for many years-when I went back for a high school reunion, I saw that the town finally actually did get a McDonald, but they did their best to tastefully disguise it).  One of my friends was black, and I can't remember thinking anything was unusual about it.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I was exposed to the fact that my parents, and grandparents and other relatives were racist. My parents had definitely not raised me that way nor expressed anything like it, but my father told me that when he first was looking at houses in that town, he decided not to choose one he liked because there was a black family living next door. Now, again, this was probably the ONLY black family in that town that actually lived in that part of town, but it had been enough to stop him from buying that house. I was kind of shocked and wondered how it was that I hadn't had the same perceptions. I was living in a college town in Ohio at that point and my neighborhood was a mixed neighborhood; the kind where you could walk around and see your neighbors on the porch waving at you and stop to talk.

Still later, I was looking at some papers from my great-grandparents in some stories about family life. My great grandfather had a favorite song he liked to sing that had a very offensive racist word in it. What was surprising to me is that it was my mother that had included the story in a book she wrote, as more of a *colorful* example of what defined her grandfather. So then I had to be introspective about what casually talking about racist stories said about my mother.

My own family doesn't have the same attitudes towards hispanics at all. My granduncle is married to a hispanic woman, my grand aunt, and I don't ever recall anyone slamming hispanics. Perhaps that's because so many of my kin are from Texas. My granduncle told me a few years back about a friend of his who was worried about the Mexicans taking over Texas. At the time, I wasn't much politically involved, so I assumed that the woman saying that was a wacky anomalie. That was before I attended a town hall meeting of Chet Edwards in Granbury and saw the Republican fear of hispanics.

I'm not trying to say that I might not have some racism in me. But I like to think that times are different and that more people would want to get rid of the artificial divisions that separate us. That acknowledges however, that, at least with older generations, that racism might be hard to overcome.