My father (indeed, an uncomfortably large number of people in family share this) is a racist.

For as long as I remember, my father always told n****r jokes and anecdotes, so I grew up around it. The thing was, I was too young to understand...I thought they were just off-color jokes, not to be taken seriously and not reflecting any sort of reality in relation to how people were viewed. I had black friends at school, always did. I had never given it a second thought. If you like somebody, you like them...who cares what color they are?

Then one day a couple of my friends came to my house to play. They knocked on the door and asked for me. My father came to me and said, "I don't want those n****rs in my yard. Tell them to leave."

I was shocked. I was confused and hurt. What was I going to say to my friends? And a funny thing: one of these so-called n****rs? Honor roll student every year attending public school, with a spotless record of good behavior (which is certainly more than could be said for me!).

Now, my father is 77 years old and he was the youngest of the family, so I understand that he grew up in a very different social climate and that old habits (or prejudices in this case) die hard. Still...it's very sad that we live in an age undreamed of in regards to ease of information access, yet so many people prefer to be backwards about this.

Anyway, I told my friends as delicately as possible what the situation was. I can only imagine how hurt and insulted they must have been. And though we stayed on good terms after that, a wedge had been driven in between us and our friendship was never really the same. Little by little, we drifted apart.

What this world needs is love and education, a renaissance of the human spirit, to join and realize that we are all one family more alike than we are different. I hope we can all work towards that together.