I grew up in a small mid-western town in central Wisconsin. My formative years were spent running through woods, fishing in nearby rivers, and being afraid of neighborhood bullies. Most of the time I deserved what was coming to me from them, but that’s not my point. What I am suggesting is that though I was 12 years old and sometimes afraid, I didn’t have to be in constant fear of ignorant discrimination, character assassination, or racist commentary every time I left my doorstep. In fact, if you asked me then, I would not have known what any of those phrases really meant as they applied to my life.

Later on in the fall of that same year, my family took a trip out East to visit our distant relatives. We stayed in upstate New Jersey for a couple of weeks, and it was there that I first discovered the painful reality of prejudice and hate that existed then and is still rampant in our society today. I was with a group of same-age kids going to the local market, when we encountered a number of Black kids playing at the same corner grocery store. I asked my White group if they hung out with any of them, and suddenly I opened the door to every racial slur that could be thrust upon my formative years. It was at that moment I learned about fear. It was at that moment, I looked at people I did not understand and listened to my East Coast peers tell me about life as it was in their community. Today, I know they were wrong, but then, in the moment, I had no choice to agree with them; that is, until later in the evening when I described the encounter to my mother. I told her the whole story, how we were playing when suddenly we came upon a group of Black people and immediately everything changed, the skies became stormy and sullen, you know, the usual frightening imagery that follows a young boy’s first encounter with ignorance. She stopped me from finishing the story and simply stated, ‘you didn’t encounter Black people at that market, you encountered ‘people’.”

We live in a world of labels. In the fall, I will return to the classroom where I have the fortunate task of bringing students from every walk of life together to achieve a certain goal – to better their education. However, that education isn’t just about the books or assessments they achieve over the next few years, more importantly, it is about how they relate to themselves, their social group and the world around them. Today, I could not imagine the pressure and challenge facing any teacher that is about to start classes in Ferguson, Missouri. Picture the environment, filled with vitriolic hate and intimidation. Yet, take a minute and also imagine the fear and confusion. I believe that is where the dialogue must begin. We already know that people cannot stand each other, and any one moment of derision – the Michael Brown shooting – can escalate a gathering of neighborhood beyond logical reason, into a rock throwing, slur slashing group of stereotyped and less dignified members of our community. After all, that is who we want to center the blame on – the thugs, the less- educated, the poverty-stricken human beings that don’t have a leg to stand on and never will unless we begin to address the central issue – inherent bigotry.

I grew up in a small town. I had the fortune of having a family that valued people rather than labels. When I was a young man, I was taught the difference between racism and acceptance, and that all occurred because our lines of communication were left open, always. I am happy to say today, I continue to preach those values in my classroom and in the community I live in. But let me be clear and say I do not stand on a podium in the middle of the county fair with leaflets. I practice my values with my family, and in my actions throughout any given day, and when I encounter small-minded thinking, I weep silently and hope that someday, a dialogue will be created to focus more on the education of our people, rather than the continued reliance upon fear as the driving force to separation of class and ongoing silent feeding of racist thinking in our society.