First Reads: It Made Me Think

One of the benefits of growing up internationally was the plethora of cultural influence.  Not just Bolivian/Latin influence, but our school was staffed by people from all over the world. My high school English teacher was Miss Norrish, and she was a blond New Zealander.  (Very pretty.  A little nugget from high school, the boys used to sit in front of her desk so they could see her legs.  That's right, Ardin, calling you out. (=  )

She approached teaching English from a literary, rather than a grammer, perspective.  We read The Great Gatsby, all kinds of Shakespeare, and Cry, the Beloved Country.  Cry, the Beloved Country resonated for a lot of reasons.  If you haven't read the book, here is the basic outline of the plot:  set in South Africa in apartheid, the story follows an African(black) pastor who goes to Johannasburg to find his son.  The son is arrested for murdering the son of the pastor's neighbor who is a white engineer.  The story follows what unfolds after the arrest and the path to redemption that the two fathers and neighbors find together. 

There are a lot of injustices in life that make me angry, but racism is one that I absolutely cannot stand.  Paton did a great job of humanizing the racial divides that can happen via ignorance and fear.   It caused me to stop and think about why racism happens, and what the consequences of it can be.  Growing up in a multicultural community with skin tones of all colors in my friends and neighbors racism was not a new concept, but it was one that I had never had experience with personally.   The ideas in the book contrasted with the daily experience of my life where the color of your skin just didn't matter.  It made me stop and think and consider what I believed and why and examine in my own heart the truth that God made us all equal and all the same in the human experience.