Your a rare bird my friend. And it kind of goes to show how some things have to be taught. And how NOT everything is worth learning.
Aye, but I'm rather happy about that. I'm sorry I wasn't aware of racism sooner. Part of me wishes I was, another part is glad I wasn't.
My town has largely been a farming community and that made it a bit like the wild west. You have to judge people by their actions and words rather than skin color. When you're surviving off the land, there isn't time to be racist. A good man or woman is valuable to the community no matter what color. The far side of my town is largely populated still by black dirt farms. These used to swamp lands and large lakes which drained by early settlers revealing super rich black dirt and there they grow all kinds of things. This town
needs the immigrant population which comes through in the summer. Nearly all of them are now Hispanic, but they used to be black. Without them, whole livings and lives would be lost because everything grown has to harvested by hand. We have a very active community center for the migrant workers so that we continue to attract the best workers. They have decent dormitories too. We want to be friendly to them because we need them as much as they need us. Once a town gets a bad rep among the migrant workers, only the ones no one else will hire will be the ones who come here and we don't want that. Nearly all of these farms are owned by Polish immigrants themselves who arrived here in the late 1800s and early 1900s; people with no history of slavery or racism. What they do have a history of is hard work. They like hard work and work hard themselves and are proud of that.
I don't deny that the recent housing boom here has brought a lot of people up here from the city, some blatantly racist, nor do I imagine that everything was all honey and roses either. Warwick never had a large black population not because they weren't welcome, but because there was little incentive to move to this neck of the woods before the civil rights era. We didn't have large industry and the rich families hired local people. There was no unowned land and what wasn't in the village, was farmland held by the same families since before the Revolution. Warwick though, was off the beaten path for so long that when I was young, pretty much everybody who lived here had roots going back a very long time. Recently the historical society here raised $200,000 to have the African Methodist church building physically moved down the street to the grounds of the society to create an exhibit documenting the black history of the town. There is not one black person on the board of directors of the society yet it was a huge topic of discussion when it was discovered the church was going to be demolished to make way for a larger one because the entire community recognized the importance of the church in town history. This despite the fact the building is architecturally unremarkable. And that's largely because of the contributions those families, the people who went to that church, made to the community over the centuries.
Had he been truly unaware he would have chosen a fruit that is more egg shaped such as the kiwi.
