I interviewed my mom about her childhood and the neighborhood she grew up in.

“My family was the typical family that you saw in the TV shows from the fifties and early sixties. My father went to college, thanks to the GI Bill, and worked as a manufacturing engineer. My mother was a homemaker who raised five children into responsible adults. We all sat down to eat as a family at 5:00 pm.”

“I grew up in the Town of Poughkeepsie, NY, which is about halfway between Manhattan and Albany. . My neighborhood was also like a fifties and early sixties TV show. It was very suburban, middle-class.”

“I hadn’t noticed it while growing up, but we lived in a rather segregated area. I had never given it any thought until I saw the Black students sitting separately at a table in the cafeteria. It gave me pause to think that they were separated from the rest of the school merely because of the color of their skin and for no other reason.”

“I started to think about the races — something I did not do much of because we were so segregated. The other thing I thought about was why we were so overwhelmingly white in the community in which I grew up. How did it get that way?”

She concluded the interview with the advice that “keeping an open mind and looking at situations from different perspectives will help you to better understand our racial and ethnic differences. Just going to school in NYC is opening you up to much more diversity than you would ever experience living anywhere in Dutchess County.”