So, we moved into the neighborhood to a welcoming committee. The twenty or so neighbors had signs and marched in front of our house. There was some yelling and screaming and my mom wouldn’t let me anywhere near the windows. But no one was hurt and after about a week or so the number of neighbors participating in the welcoming committee diminished. Everything eventually calmed down a bit and they stopped bothering us and we didn’t bother them, except for two neighbor families; their racism and hatred ran deeper, and they continued belligerent behaviors (mostly yelling and screaming, although there was one physical altercation that we didn’t talk about) for about a year. On the other side of the coin, there were two families that refused to participate in the welcoming committee and advocated for peace; one was a Jewish family, the other a Christian family. These were the only families in the community that would speak to us for years.
I was enrolled in the local elementary school, the first non-white child to ever enter the school (well at least I’m infamous for something). I was accosted and abused by my fellow students at first. I was physically attacked on two occasions, these were bigger kids, not my kindergarten classmates. My big brother taught me how to defend myself, but the attacks stopped, and I never had to put my lack of skills into practice (thank God).
But there was abuse and hurt besides physical. I remember one teacher in particular; I believe this was fourth grade. We had just started as a new class and she was lecturing on European history and explained that a WASP was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and she turned and looked directly at me and said that if anyone called her a WASP in a disrespectful way, she’d “lambaste” them. I don’t know why she picked me to lambaste, but at recess that day several of the boys practically begged me to call them a WASP (the implication being that they wanted in on some of that authorized lambasting action, which I did not support).
