How far have we come?

I was 11 years old the first time I heard a racist joke. Until that day, I wasn't even aware that social lines had been drawn according to skin color. The independent school system I attended in southeast Kentucky was along the main route between three states and had a relatively diverse student population, so I had never known what it meant to be segregated. My mother taught first grade, and once a year, she was asked to record the number of minority students in her class. She has often commented that she used to have to look at the children as she filled out the form because she had never paid much attention to race while she worked to fill her students' minds.

Just before I started sixth grade, our family moved to my mother's home town. It's a friendly place, but it was there, on my first day in new class with a sea of caucasion faces like mine, a small, red-haired boy told me a joke using a word I'd never heard before. I laughed nervously, pretending I understood, but when I went home and asked my mother what the word meant, she was horrified and told me to never say that word again. She told me about something called prejudice--pre-judging someone based on superficial characteristics. Later, I asked my new friend Kim, a pretty, dark-haired girl with pale blue eyes and dimpled cheeks, if there were any children in our school who weren't white. She looked at me very innocently and surprised. "I've never known anyone who wasn't," she answered. "Have you?"

I was in high school before I saw a minority student in our school system. Although I heard a few more racial slurs over the years, I found that most of the kids I came to know weren't racist but rather simply unaware of a culture other than our own, mostly so-called "Scots-Irish" ancestry (that's a discussion for another time).

Several years later, I've lived in several communities around the Commonwealth, from very small towns to more metro areas, and I have come to know people with rich and varied heritages and cultures. It makes life a rather interesting patchwork quilt. I relish the stories of my own family, and appreciate the value of histories as varied as the landscape of our world.

But if I had been lulled into thinking we're all holding hands around a unity candle, I was jarred back to reality for a moment in the waiting room at a doctor's office this week. The man next to me began to strike up a conversation about football, hunting, and finally, minorities.

"I'm about as prejudiced as they come," he announced, a measure of pride in his voice. It seemed to me that the crowded waiting room quieted.

It took me back to sixth grade and the awkward moment looking at little red-haired Todd.

There was no urge to laugh politely this time.

"I try my best not to be," I said shortly, and went back to reading a book.

Something made me look up, however. I raised my head and caught the eye of the woman directly across from me. A little girl with skin much darker than her own slept with her head on the woman's chest. The woman smiled.

I returned the smile, but with a troubling question whispering itself in my ear. How far have we come-- really?