And i wasn’t even eight when the priesthood ban was eliminated, so i don’t have any memories to share of that event—i don’t even remember it at all. Kind of weird to have technically not been a member of the church when something so momentous but relatively recent occurred, you know?

Thanks, Coffinberry. It sounds as though, like me, you have picked through your memory to remember as much as possible what experiences went into your own early awareness. It’s remarkable how sometimes such small memories are so clear and loom so large.

My experience with the N-word was also with the Christmas mixed nut bowl, and the way I learned Eenie-Meenie-Miny-Moe. I think I was much older before I realized some folks used the word to describe people. It was a nonsense word with no meaning.

At the YMCA camp where my widowed mother worked summers (so us kids could come along) was the first place I met and befriended black people, and my recollection was that they were just people.

When my mom remarried, though, it was to a man from a very different and more inner-city background. I distinctly remember that he did not trust black people, and it may have been from him that I first learned that the N-word applied to people, because that is what he called black people. I also learned to call a particular kind of soup “Honky Soup.” We ate a lot of Honky Soup.

And while I remember that my mom was excited for the 1978 announcement, I also remember her remarking to someone that what was most worrisome to her and my step-dad was that now there wasn’t a good reason to give for why their daughters couldn’t marry a black man. It took me a long time to puzzle out what they meant by that, and why they cared.

Whether it was an accident of timing or no, in retrospect I cannot help but notice that they chose to move to the white-only extreme backwoods of Appalachia just at the time that the federal courts mandated bussing between the inner city school district and the ring of suburban districts around our city. Ours was not the only family that made that move then… and the rapid influx of former city dwellers to the area (with their city learning and liberal thinking, believe it or not) ironically gave rise to the law suit Mozert v. Hawkins County Bd. of Education in which the court ordered that parents could not require school districts to their children from certain streams of thought at school. (Got lotsa experience from that place about being the “other” as a Mormon, but frankly anything that wasn’t Scotch-Irish white Baptist was “other” there.)

We moved again my senior year to rural Iowa, and there too there were zero black people in the county, let alone at church.

One of my marked memories was a pair of events 6 weeks apart as a young married person in Los Angeles: First the Rodney King Riot, followed by the Bear Lake Earthquake. During and after the riot, everyone cowered behind closed doors, afraid of their neighbors. It didn’t matter what race you were. But after the earthquake, everyone was quick to share what they had and see that each other was alright. It didn’t matter what race you were.

Thanks, kevinf, especially for the length and detail. With the emphasis on history around here, and some discussions about how to cast history, what to include and what to omit, I wondered what challenges would come from trying to be candid about history recent enough to include our own lives. It would be easy if all our experiences put us on the right side of history (and morality), but they don’t, do they? I’m still trying to figure out my taunting of the kids at the Army base playground: I *had* to have heard those words from somebody, and I also understood that they were hurtful even if I didn’t understand how or why they hurt — I certainly chanted them with the intention of putting down somebody and justifying my hanging on to the swings. But I don’t remember.

However, in my junior year in high school, I was paired with an African American kid as a debate partner for most of the year. He was bright, hard working, and a serious student, and we became friends. The one sad and embarrassing incident with this friend came when several of us were sitting around and telling stories about the crazy family on one side of us. The father was publicly physically abusive to his sons, a bully as a scoutmaster, and generally was avoided by most of the neighborhood. As I was telling stories about this family, my debate partner said something about how hard it must be to live by neighbors like that. I laughed and responded, getting all the way to the end of this next statement before I realized what I was saying. I said, “Even the negro family on the other side are better neighbors…”, suddenly looking for a hole in the floor to sink in to.

It hurt. He was quiet, but things were never quite the same, and even though we still debated together, we were never really friends after that. I knew I had done something awful, and that even my fumbled apology probably sounded hollow and meaningless. It was the beginning of a new awareness on my part that he was really not all that different from me, and I began to question some, if not all, that I had been taught.

A few years later in college at Weber State, I got a new look at public and institutionalized racism when two men and a college age girl were murdered and a third man brutally injured in the robbery of the Ogden Hi Fi Shop. I was working both for the college radio station at the time, and taking some journalism classes. A friend was a student intern and news stringer for KSL-TV, and involved me in helping to do some research and follow up on the investigation and later arrests. Any young black man driving in Ogden was likely to be stopped and interrogated by the police. One student acquaintance quit driving until the arrests were made to avoid being targeted for harassment by the police. Racial tensions became ugly and more public than I had ever experienced. Rumors of both angry groups of blacks and vigilante white mobs probably had more truth that we liked to admit at the time. The Ogden police chief and the city attorney engaged in some activities following the arrests that certainly violated the rights of the accused, and reflected an ugly racial view that made me feel that we weren’t really all that much better than some of the towns in the South.

I’ve thought about that song every time I’ve heard it sung, and reflected on my parents, good folks who really tried to teach my brothers and I to choose the right. My father actually had been recognized in his work as a civilian for the Air Force for some of his work supervising a group of minority workers at one time. and I have no doubt that he treated them fairly. But the undercurrent of “different” and “cursed” was quietly taught by my good parents. It was not done with rancor. Outside of the Christmas nut bowl, we were never allowed to say the N word, but we were subtly made aware of those differences. To their credit, they both accepted the 1978 revelation without any reservations. But by then, they had moved from Ogden, and the waves of racism were no longer carrying them along with the current of the the 50′s and 60′s, ripe with fear and mistrust.

Sorry for the length here, but it’s a hard subject to look back upon. Thanks for sharing, and giving us the chance to look back and remember, lest we forget.