"For Those of Us Who Dared"

I was not raised like this.  People from Pasadena were open, much more progressive. Or, so I thought. When I started writing this book, I decided I wanted to write about my experience growing up in the City of Roses—Pasadena, California—and the profound impact it had on my life.  It wasn’t until I started digging a bit and doing some research that I learned people from Pasadena suffered from the same racist history as many other cities in the country.  At one time, schools were separate and kids didn’t play together.  But that wasn’t the Pasadena I grew up in.  So, the story I wanted to tell changed a little.  Instead of starting with my own experience, I am starting with this:

On September 14, 1970, Governor of California, Ronald Reagan said this of “Forced Bussing” as a way to solve the problem of segregation in a southern California school district:

“It is a ridiculous waste of time and public money and will undermine all efforts to improve the quality of our public schools…Forced bussing would also deprive them [the children who would be bussed] of the natural environment of the neighborhood school.”  

Governor Ronald Reagan didn’t live in my neighborhood. Governor Ronald Reagan didn’t live in any neighborhood.  He lived in the fictitious world of the Hollywood screen where the notion of “Manifest Destiny” was glamorized.  He lived in a world where White men were heroes and the indigenous people of this land were savages who needed to be herded up and put in their proper place, a reservation.  Maybe this is what Governor Reagan was suggesting, that I and others like me stay on our reservations, in the “natural environment” of our neighborhoods.  Well, we didn’t Governor Reagan.  And, for the record, a ghetto is not a “natural environment.”  A ghetto is a place that is carefully crafted and created by those unwilling to look a sad and vicious history in the face.  A ghetto is like that brother with a substance abuse problem in a family of over-achievers, that brother who can’t keep a job and who has been in and out of trouble his whole life.  The rest of the family pretends he doesn’t exist and hopes he doesn’t show up at inopportune times to embarrass them in front of their over-achieving friends.  But he does show up, just like the ghetto.  It shows up.  It shows up because it too is a part of the family, the American family.  And we can’t close our eyes to it as it festers in its “natural environment”.  The ground on which it was built was polluted, so too will be its harvest.  

Too bad Governor Reagan didn’t understand this.  Or maybe he just didn’t care.  Some of us did care.  So we got on that bus, both Black and White.

I am a part of that “we” who got on that bus that drove to the other side of town, the White side of town but not the initial “we.”  The Black and White people in 1970 who put their children on those buses to be schooled in foreign environments were the heroes.  Not heroes because they did something dangerous or risky or put their children in harm’s way, but because they dared.  They dared to do something that was right.

I got on the bus in September of 1980 - ten years after a judicial order forced the Pasadena Unified School District to use bussing as a means to integrate public schools.  I was not an activist and neither were my parents.  I was a beneficiary of this valiant effort by socially conscious people, activists, nervous parents and community members who had the nerve to deal with America’s estranged brother.  I was in the first-grade...

-the constant sweetness within