Less Than 50 Years

Last night was my first one volunteering at the RACE: Are We So Different? exhibit at the library here in Rochester. I have been looking forward to this opportunity since, as I have said before, this is one of those major issues that I feel is fundamental to who we are as Americans.

Watching the people go through the exhibit I was humbled to be a part of such a venture. Between 20 and 30 people went through during the evening. I watched a father and his early teen-aged son walk around talking about the things they were watching. A mother said that she was there because her son had been there with a school group and told her she had to see it. There was a pair of Asian women and an African man sitting and watching one of the videos.

There are several places around the exhibit where people are invited to leave their comments or personal stories. That got me thinking about my own journey. And I was suddenly surprised. I had always considered myself German and Russian Jewish based on my parents. But I also knew that a great-grandmother may have been Native American according to some family oral tradition. Then I did a little more looking and realized that in that great=grandparents' generation was one of Scottish descent.

Suddenly my genealogy became:

• 50% Russian Jewish
• 25% German
• 12.5% Native American
• 12.5% Scottish.

Whoa! That begins to change my self-perception. Back in 1944 when my parents were married it was a mixed marriage of epic proportions, potentially fraught with much prejudice in a small north-central Pennsylvania town.

It wasn't illegal for my parents to get married. But at that same time in many states it was illegal for whites and blacks to be married. The first such laws (and the first mention of the word "white" in a racial sense) was in Virginia in 1691. In 1924 the Virginia "Racial Integrity Act" was passed. It

required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (all other, essentially, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as colored, persons with any African or Indian ancestry. It [classified] marriage between a white person and a non-white person as a felony. In 1967 the law was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.
-Wikipedia

In other words, it is only within my lifetime, and the lifetime of all Baby Boomers, that such laws were overturned. Some, though unenforced since 1967, stayed on the books until as late as 2000!

That is humbling and makes it quite clear that we are still in the relatively young stages of overcoming racial issues. It has been only 43 out of almost 400 years. And that is why I am glad that we are having this exhibit. We have come a long way and I pray that we continue on the path.

(I will be blogging on this on a regular basis over the next few months as I reflect on what I hear and see.)

Links:
Local Rochester, MN, Information
Rochester, MN, Community Events

RACE- Are We So Different?

Science Museum of Minnesota RACE website

Race: The Power of an Illusion

Race: The Power of an Illusion transcripts