Son: Why? (Looking
at me quizzically.)
Me: I had a
productive day and just looked at the clock and knew you were on the way home.
Son: Oh, ok. Come give your baby boy a hug. (I humbly obliged.)
Mom, you won’t believe this… a kid
at school didn’t know who Nelson Mandela was…
Me: Wow. Well, was the kid white?
Son: Yeah. That would really be shame if he was black.
Me: Was he in
your class?
Son: Yeah. He was the only kid in class that
didn’t know about him. I don’t know why
he asked in science, but, uh, he’s really smart. One of the smartest kids in the class. That’s why I was so shocked.
Me: What did the
teacher say?
Son: That Nelson
Mandela was the Martin Luther King of South Africa.
Me: Good analogy.
Son: They both fought for peace and equal rights
and they both went to jail for it. But
what I don’t get is how white people can just go and take someone’s land. Black people lived there and white people
just came and took it.
Me: Not only that, but some of those Africans
were brought here to slave for the land that the settlers took from the
Indians.
Son: Wow.
I don’t know why I automatically assumed that the student was
white. I guess because maybe I know that
certain history topics were skipped when I went to school, and that a lot of
black history I learned was from my family.
The interesting thing to me is that my son and I both spoke
with no malice, no content, just the sad true reality, and then he got the
leash to walk his dog.
