Reply #150: Not racial, but religious: when I was 7 [View All]

we moved temporarily from the farm to an apartment in the city. I made friends with the neighborhood kids but they always asked odd questions about religion. I told them I was Presbyterian and they talked about their faith, which I found fascinating because it involved candles, etc. - much more interesting than just saying prayers at dinnertime.

They were having a special holiday and I asked if I could come inside to see the ceremony, but their parents became very angry. It really hurt my feelings. Suddenly our new neighbor friends were cold and rude to my sisters and I, we couldn't figure out what happened. They would chase us, call us names and jump out from corners when we walked down the sidewalk and knock us to the ground. It even spread to school, where one of my classmates in 2nd grade asked me at recess if I was a protestant. I still couldn't figure out what difference that made, but said "yeah, so what"?

From then on none of the other kids in class would play with us, it was just the two of us by ourselves on the playground. After a while, we were assigned to seats by ourselves in the back of the classroom. We still tried to play with the other kids, but they shut us out.

Pretty soon, the violence escalated. On the way home from school one afternoon, one of the boys in my class jumped out from an alley and beat the crap out of me. My mom was very upset and went to the school to complain. Things became very tense. Finally she said she was going to move us out of there as soon as possible. Both my sisters were attacked by the girl next door who left big, painful bites on their forearms. We were terrified, afraid to go outside our apartmentm, we cried and had nightmares.

A month later, my mom remarried (she was going through a divorce at the time) and we moved back out to the suburbs. The school out there looked the same and the kids looked the same, but no one ever asked you about your religion and no one beat you up.

I forgot about the terror at the bad school in the city after a couple of months.
Later in my teens, I happened to remember it and attributed it to "city" people being different. I asked my mom and she told me the truth: We were the only protestant kids in a neighborhood of Jewish people. We were being discriminated against because we weren't Jewish. I never held it against anyone except the people in that neighborhood. I later had many Jewish friends, roommates in college and was even engaged to a Jewish man in later years. But I never forgot how it felt to be a victim of discrimination.