Recent conversations started me thinking about how different growing up in Key West must have been from other places. I'm not politically correct, at least not consciously so. I don't have to censor my words because I simply don't have those thoughts to weed out. You know the ones. 

We did not have racial issues, or at least I can't remember any. So recently, I started thinking...what if I am wrong? Maybe there were racial issues and I didn't see them because I was insulated. Maybe I didn't choose to see them; unconsciously screened some things out. So I began to examine my memories again, in a more objective light. 

First, I remembered how repulsed I was whenever we left home and visited other southern states, like Mississippi and Georgia, and I heard people talk about black people. Not as equals or with any respect, but in denigrating and insulting terms and tones. Constantly. I remember how that made me feel...basically that I could never fit in with these people. They were alien to me. Many of them were my family, but I could never relax around them because their core beliefs were too different from mine. It's not only that they were prejudiced, but that they were obsessed by that prejudice. I never felt that way around my mother's family, but mom grew up on an island and didn't have that inbred self-righteousness inherent in dad's side of the family. 

So that led me to think about conversations and the way black people were spoken to/of/about in Key West, and I came to the conclusion that the attitude of my friends and family in other states made me profoundly uncomfortable was that at home we simply did not talk or think that way. We didn't think of the black kids as being significantly different. The words and attitudes I saw elsewhere, on television and in other areas were never voiced. Try as I might, I could not remember a single instance of the "N" word, which I refuse to use to this day. I remembered proud conversations about our star athletes, some of whom were black. There were no qualifiers attached to their accomplishments. I remember black kids moving in and out of our circles like everyone else. Being a tiny school - graduating class of 200 - with only one other school in town, a private catholic school with a graduating class of about 10, we all grew up together. We all went to one of about 5 elementary schools and 2 middle schools. As a result, social groups were looser and more friendly. We had less identifiable knots, and it was pretty rare to see an all-black group or an all-white one. If you looked at my yearbooks, you'd see what I remember. They are filled with candid moments, smiling faces...and mixed races. 

Two incidents that involve race that stick out in my mind. The first was a demonstration.It's been a very long time, but I think it was about Martin Luther King Day. It was not yet a national holiday, and peaceful demonstrations were planned all over the country. Some states had adopted MLK Day as a state holiday, but Florida had not. My parents were terrified there would be a riot. It was all over the news, that there would likely be riots, violence and general craziness. The media, even circa 1974, was in full sensationalist mode and everybody was buying it, just like they do today. What actually happened was that the black kids elected to have a sit-in. They walked out of school and sat in the middle of the road (it was a main street running through the center of town). But before they staged the protest they did something I'll bet happened in very few other places. They invited the white kids to join them. And we did. The police came...and diverted traffic. 

The second incident involved the graduation party of a friend, Lynne. My trusty volkswagen beetle was laden with about 6 kids, and we were making the rounds of half a dozen parties and stopped at Lynne's somewhere in the middle. Her yard was packed with people, dancing, laughing, hugging...all of them black. Here's the significant thing. We didn't hesitate for one second to plunge in. We didn't think about whether we would be accepted. We didn't huddle together for safety. We didn't have to. In fact, I was hardly out of the car when one of my friends caught me in a bone-crunching hug and dragged me in to meet his parents.

I never gave that party a second thought before aside from fond memories, but when examining whether or not there was prejudice I was unaware of in our society I think it's significant that there was no conversation about whether we should go in. In our view, there were no reasons not to. We already knew we would be welcome and we would be safe. And we were.