My senior year in High School was turning out to be a disaster. Especially my math class. Luckily I was assigned a peer tutor. I can’t remember her name at the moment but I can close my eyes and picture her in my mind. She was intelligent, great personality, interested in a lot of the same things I was especially art and she was African-American. She was a darker skin African-American and she was drop dead beautiful.
I was suddenly very motivated to do well in math with this peer tutor. On the weekends after studying together at the library we would go to one of the museums. We never went to her parents apartment as her Father didn’t like “white boys” and I couldn’t bring her home because my Mother didn’t like “African-Americans” although she used a different word to describe them.
We had been dating for about 4 months when my Mother found out that I was dating an African-American girl. My Mother went “postal”! I was getting ready for a date when my Mother finally confronted me. It was a knock down, drag our argument with my Mother yelling, screaming, and crying. For a bit of drama she ran into the kitchen and pulled open the flatware drawer and grabbed a butter knife and held it to her heart and shouted, “go ahead, push and twist, push and twist, there are more Jewish girls in Brooklyn than there are in Israel and YOU have to go out with a N&#%$”. How can you do this to your Mother?
Her Father found out about me. Not only was I white but I was Jewish. We stopped dating but remained friends. The sad thing is that 43 years later there are too many people that still have prejudices based on ignorance.