Peer Pressure

Something began to change within me during my Second Grade year. My friend Lulu and her family had moved away a few years back, and another black family had moved in. For some reason I allowed the wall to go up. I didn’t cross the street and make friends with anyone; I obeyed the unwritten law. I waved hello and I was polite, but I wasn’t their neighbor. We peered at each other like North and South Korea, too afraid to cross our own personal DMZ.
Other families would come and go in the house across the street and they’d all be black and we’d never really know them and they’d never know us; we’d stick to our own kind like all Americans were supposed to.
I slowly gave in to prejudice. I was the worst kind, I stood silent even though I knew it was wrong and stupid, but I was a kid and I had to get along. The older kids had all kinds of names for the people who lived next to us in Jericho; coon and jungle bunny and tar baby, and of course- nigger. I had to laugh along and not say anything or I’d risk another punch in the nose, and the threat of even more violence. The wall was up and I’d help put it there, and it would be years before I’d help to knock it down.
I had joined the mob. I would laugh along when jokes were made about the girls who weren’t as pretty as Joyce and Sheila. I’d call the kids with glasses four-eyes, and the over-weight ones fatty, and I’d laugh with everybody else. We were kids and we were cruel, and we’d revel in that cruelty.
I guess I had forgotten. Forgotten that I was the target of the older kids in my neighborhood. Forgotten that I was their punching bag; the butt of all their jokes. Forgotten my friend Lulu.
I was just like everybody else, and I was dishing it out instead of taking it for a change.
It was just name-calling and having a bit of fun.
Anyway, I wasn’t hurting anybody, was I?