General Discussion

As a black woman, married, college educated, mother of three who are also college educated, I'd like to think that we are all a product of our environment. My husband and I are both from large families. who were poorer than a church mouse, but our parents had strong work ethics that were passed on to their children. They also taught us that the world didn't owe us anything, but that we could have anything we wanted if we were willing to work hard for it.

The major difference between my husband and my background, was that I was from California, where we had good public schools and very inexpensive community colleges and my husband was from Virginia where they had segregated public schools, (his high school became integrated the year he began) and the VA community colleges may as well have been 4 yr universities, as there was no way they would ever be able to afford to go to one.

As the 5th of 9 children, I had always planned to be a CPA, like my brother, but ended up in the Army, after breaking up with my cheating boyfriend in my Senior year in high school and just needing to get the heck out of Dodge.

Fast forward, I served my 4 yr enlistment, attended classes at night, and finished my Bachelor Degree in Accounting in 2 and a half years after leaving the military.

My husband and I got good jobs in nice middle class (predominately white) neighborhoods and raised our families there. My kids all went to private christian schools, predominately white, because as the mother of 3 black children, I knew that they were at-risk, and failure was not an option.

My kids were all successful in their academics, popular, strong leaders within their peers, and all were mature beyond their years. The maturity I attribute to the fact that as blacks, my husband's and my parents never had time for foolishness where their kids were concerned, and neither did we. We also knew that our black children would face a different world, and be held to a different standard than their white peers, when they went out into the world and they had to be prepared for it with the right skills and not a chip on their shoulder.

As it turned out my 2 sons dated white girls in high school because there were very few black girls in their schools or within the activities in which they were exposed on a daily basis. My boys participated in football, basketball, karate, and drama. (The drama came about when the school's drama coach needed some boys for Macbeth my older son's freshman year and the football coach volunteered some of his best players as a favor to the Drama Coach. My son was a natural and his younger brother was too, five years later. They also both were good singers. My oldest son also made the Varsity football team as a Freshman and was one of the 3 Co-varsity Captains his sophomore year. My sons both went out of state to colleges with small minority populations and both did well.

My daughter who was the oldest, dated only black men, and as far back as when she was in the first grade she had an entrepreneurial spirit about her and was driven towards having her own business. She was always more serious, and financially responsible than any of the men she ever dated. She only recently married the man of her dreams, (and my dreams for her) at age 33, and 8 years after her brother who is 3 yrs younger than her married the woman of his dreams at 22. Her brother married a white woman, and her younger brother will probably do so as well, because that is who they were raised around, and played with in their neighborhood, who they went to school with, hung out with, and socialized with. My daughter had to make the effort to meet and socialize with her young black peers, and finally moved to a southern state where there were many more young professionals. She has many white friends both professionally and socially, but she always was attracted to black men, (of which there were fewer of in her circles), and my guess is because she was searching for a man who was just like the father she had; who treated his wife like she was his queen, and his daughter like she was a princess, and she was convinced that he was out there, and if she was patient, eventually, she'd find him. Admittedly, as the years passed, I thought he'd never come, but, I'm glad she had more faith than I did.