Good first evening with the friends. Man, I miss these guys. I miss just hanging out, and talking music, and in-jokes, and shared history.

Tomorrow will be a busy one, but should also be good. I hope the show makes some money for them. It sucks that their Phoenix gig fell through but I'm happy for the extra time.

My parents never, never ever ever, said any similar to me. Oh hell no.

I do not follow those guidelines (shocking, I know) and not once have I had my life threatened when I was a minority in a setting or an event.

I grew up in New Orleans, with a majority black population, and my parents never said ANYTHING so stupid and racist to me.

Thank you! I was a bit concerned that maybe my normal, not paranoid, not bigoted parenting experience wasn't really the norm. My heart breaks for children raised this way, and I have encountered some, but a really tiny minority.

Granted, I live in a large city with a diverse population and my kids go to public school. The parents that I have met that have these notions tend to either move to school districts that are less mixed, home school, or send the kids to private schools.

So back to the more basic - WTF is wrong with people?

Yay Liese for the exhausting fun times!

Yay! Except I woke up in three hours with shoulder pain. Shoulder pain before a day of moving a bunch of equipment is bad. Must have done something cleaning. Not good.

I shoudl be all ambitious about the long list of things that I should accomplish this weekend, but mostly I feel like playing stupid Facebook games. SIGH

I am almost ready to leave for choir rehearsal! More or less up and at em.

My parents never, never ever ever, said any similar to me. Oh hell no.

Oh hells no. And I did go to inner city public schools.

Timelies all!

Went to my MIL's for the first seder last night. Tonight we meet my FIL and SMIL for dinner.(Some sort of steakhouse, probably)

I kept thinking the "talk" article was a parody, because my ads were for re-electing Obama.

No one ever had that talk with me, and I went to a school with 4 black people (2 were special needs kids adopted by a family who adopted many more special needs kids), 1 jewish person, and 10 asians. It was a a country school, not a suburban one. I do sometimes wish I could talk to these kids now about their point of view, because for me growing up, I was completely ignorant of rascism because the population was so small you could not see it, and the only people who seemed to have trouble were the special needs kids (and those kids, white and black had it very, very bad. Even the nice kids were horrible to them)

My mother was an aging pre-hippy, so she was really into "everyone is a person, we don't see color", which has its own problems, but I think it ended up being a good foundation to appreciate issues as an adult, because being open minded and listening to people was also valued. At least it makes one open enough to actually talk to people!

They discussed that article this morning on MSNBC (Up with Chris Hayes) and the short summary was that the man who wrote the article is well known for his racist insanity, so not even close to main stream crazy.

I too grew up in a practically mono-cultural suburb, not counting the significant subset of Catholic kids, many of whom went to the local parish grammar school. There was a slight smattering of Jewish kids, and like one Japanese-American and one Chinese-American.

The first time I met black kids my age was at a YMCA day camp in the summers. Otherwise it would have been not until college!