Getting A Little Personal: The Prelude

This is just a quick note to the few who do read my blog. These post have a little different tone than the typical post that I do about adoption. So, I moved to them to a different blog that I am calling, "The Color of my Culture." It gives my unique perspective on race, how it affects the self-identify of children, and what some of the long and short-term consequences can be.

The Prelude
Part 1: Early Education
Part 2: MisEducation
Part 3: Educating Them & Us
Part 4: Home Schooling
Part 5: Return to Education
Part 6: Education of a Mayor

Through these articles you do find out why I became so heavily involved in working with children and why I was so committed to the idea of adoption at an early age.

• I lived in an all black working-class neighborhood and went to an all white school in an upper middle-class neighborhood.
• My father married a white woman with three children in 1970's Indianapolis, so I was part of two transracial families from age 10 into adulthood. Whew...we survived it!
• My father's mother was mixed (Cherokee, Scottish, Black) and the politics of that were very present in almost all of my interactions with my grandmother. For black readers, my grandmother was COLOR STRUCK and not ashamed to let you know it.
  
• Both of my parents interacted socially with friends of different races but RARELY was race ever discussed in our home while I was growing up. Except for the white friends that were no longer allowed to visit my stepmother after she married a black man.
  
• I attended a traditional black church where I was told that, "I could do all things through Christ..." I was told that I was created in God's image and to never hide my light under a bushel.
  

Through this series of posts I hope to give at least a glimpse into the complexities and hurdles of being black in America.

Don't laugh at this picture of me with the Mayor of Indianapolis. I was 16 and had won the ACTO-SO award for writing. ACT-SO is the Afro-Academic, Cultural Technological and Scientific Olympics.