A Lack Of A Lot Of Formal Education And Racial Tolerance Are Not Mutually Exclusive [View All]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

My dad had a ninth grade education and he was one of the most racially tolerant, color blind people I have ever known... He dropped out of school at fifteen to support his family during the Great Depression... He then became a Golden Gloves boxer, a bartender, a disabled veteran, a candy store owner, and finally a construction worker...

We moved to Deltona, Florida from New York in 1970...Florida was a very different place then...My father got a job doing light construction work... On his first day on the job he sat down to have lunch with his African American co-workers... They told him the white workers would shun him if he continued to do that...He also made some African American friends who we would visit in DeLand...DeLand was very segregated then... It still is in some ways... When we visited, there weren't any white folks in sight but my dad didn't mind... When they visited us some of our white neighbors would make outright racist comments...

Conversely I have heard racist and anti-Semitic comments from so called educated people; people with PhDs and tenured professorships at major universities...I have heard American University (AU) called (AJew)... I have heard The New Republic called The Jew Republic; probably because many of their editors were Jewish... I have heard a professor lament how Jewish students arrived at AU in their limousines...

I was in grad school at Florida State University during the 1984 election...One of my fellow grad students, who was getting much better grades than me and was smarter, would make racist comments about Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan and imitate them in his best "Holy Mackerel" voice... Like most grad students he also taught introductory classes... He would make disparaging remarks about his African American students... He probably would have made more insensitive statements if he knew me and my buddy, Jay, would have been really offended...

Being smart and being a good person or tolerant are not synonomous...