bussing Archives - The Race Card Project

DON’T ASK ME TO JUST FORGET

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024 bussing, cotton, Family, Farm, first experience, fish, forget, LA, Nashville, poor, responsibility, Thaddeus, TN

Thaddeus,
Nashville, TN.

I was raised poor in Louisiana where the generations of my family before me farmed and picked cotton, fished and lived off the land. Our water was rain water caught in a ground cistern and we used an outhouse for a toilet and boiled water for each night to bathe. So please don’t tell me how “privileged” I was raised. My first year of junior high, I was suddenly bussed halfway across the parish for desegregation instead of going to school with the kids I’d known since first grade. Our family cemetery started as the cemetery for a Confederate fort because it was high ground that never flooded. I cannot and will not forget the sacrifices that my ancestors made and the path that was blazed for my life. I’ve researched my genealogy back to the early 1800’s and there’s no documentation that any of them ever owned a slave. Instead, pictures show that the families as poor farm folk who led hard lives and were devoted Christians. They worked hard for what little they had. Even with more education and 12 years of military service, I, too, have had to work and scrimp to save for what I’ve accumulated over the years. I certainly don’t count myself as privileged, merely that I’ve been taught how to be happy with little and have some peace of mind with a hope for a better life on the other side of this one. I’ve learned to quit looking at what everyone else has and be thankful for what little I have. After all, it’s unlikely anybody is going to give you much. You’ve got to take some responsibility and get it for yourself.

White. Privileged. Always a bit guilty.

May 12, 2013May 13, 2013 AZ, bussing, Chandler, Joey Moncada, South, whtie privilege

Joey Moncada
Chandler, AZ

I grew up in the South during the era of busing. My parents never showed any hint of discrimination against anyone. I was taught, and believed, from my earliest days that all people are equal in the eyes of God, that everyone has the same intrinsic potential and worth. But I also remember keenly the black man who worked my grandparents’ farm for years, but was not allowed into the house. I remember that we had only two black families in our neighborhood. I remember the time that a fellow student told my sister, in elementary school, that she shouldn’t be friends with a boy named Stephen, who was black. She asked my mother whether it was because Stephen was a boy, because it never occurred to her that it could be because of the color of his skin.

Though I have always had friends of a wide range of backgrounds and always believed we understand each other, really, most of the people I see socially are white and upper middle class, like me. My life is hard in some ways, but it is, I believe, easier than many people of minority backgrounds whose situations might mirror my own, save for the color of our skin. Have I worked hard at my career, my friendships, my reputation in my community? Of course, and those things are important. In the back of my mind, though, there are always questions: Am I just lucky to have been born white? Do people who aren’t judge me before they really know me because of any benefits they perceive I have just from being white? How do I bridge that gap (without being contrived or insipid)…or is that guilt really a construct, all in my head?

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