15w1d - The World Acorn Will Know

We had our annual MLK celebration at work today. It’s one of my favorite days at work. All the muckity-mucks come out, we bring in a current leader for social change (a few years ago it was Coretta Scott King, who was pretty freakin’ awesome, this year it was R&B artist John Legend, who was surprisingly inspirational), and it’s a two hour celebration of how far we, as a society and as a company, have come and how much further we have to go. It was pretty amazing.

It made me think about the changes I have seen in my lifetime. I have only been around for a bit over 31 years – not a very long time. But the changes I have seen are amazing. In my home town (and even within my own home), in ‘liberal, integrated northern New Jersey,’ there was a surprising amount of fear and hate. The n-word was used to describe people as though it was just an okay thing to say. And the f-word was used to describe gay people the same way you might interchange large with big. We had all of the racial, ethnic, whatever slurs, and we used them in my home. My parents used them. They were just, well, normal. If your skin was a different color, you were different and had a different place in society. Hell, if you had different genitals, you had a different place in society. Even though I was always encouraged to get good grades, the only real expectation placed upon me was to marry to a man with a good job and learn to take care of him. It was a world where white, straight males dominated, and everybody else was subservient. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to date (I still did, but it was frowned upon), so I’m not entirely sure how I was supposed to learn the flirtation skills needed to land Mr. Money Bags (somehow I still learned how to flirt and got myself a guy with a good career, but that’s another story, probably not for this blog).

While my parents didn’t approve of my dating habits, they tolerated them. Why? Because I only dated white males. I didn’t date women. And I didn’t dare bring home a gasp black guy. I had one really close friend in high school who was black, and one day he came over to my house alone (while everybody was home, mind you), and my dad freaked out. Chewed me out for bringing a black guy to the house. I mean, what would the neighbors think? I explained that he and I weren’t dating, but even if we were it shouldn’t matter. It was a big fight. It was a big deal.

It’s different now. The world isn’t done changing, but it’s getting there. Interracial couples are fine now. They don’t create any controversy in any circle that I am in. They are represented on television (as long as everybody is thin and attractive, of course, but fat-ism is another issue). It’s even mostly okay to be gay now (maybe one day same-sex marriages will be okay). There are somewhere on the order of 13 female CEOs of fortune 500 companies (mine being one of those companies). Things aren’t 100% equal yet, and I still sense some amount of sexism, I personally have never been denied an opportunity due to my gender. I have never felt the brunt of it. And many of the men in my generation (at least in my circles) respect women as equals in the work place and respect their wives as partners in their marriages.

This gives me great hope for the world that Acorn will know, and the environment in which Acorn will grow up. While we don’t know if Acorn will be a boy or a girl, we can guarantee that (s)he will be white. But regardless of that, Acorn will not know a world where he or she cannot date somebody black, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, lest he/she be judged by society and cast out by his/her parents (dating a criminal, drug dealer, a conservative Christian [haha – just kidding – sort of] or somebody else who could be a bad influence in some other way is a different story and will be far less tolerated, we’re not THAT open-minded). And Acorn will be lucky enough to be born into a world where many people (and, most importantly, his/her parents) understand that whether (s)he is gay, straight, bisexual or whatever has already been determined by the DNA that Hubby-poo and I provided – the same way his/her eye color, hair color, nose size, etc. have been. And, even if sexuality was a choice, that it would be fine to choose either choice.

This makes me feel okay.