Personal Perspectives: Reflections on Racism

My father was four years old when he began working in the fields with his migrant farm worker family. As a teenager during the Great Depression, he watched as his baby brother died of starvation because the family could not find work. He later said to me, "We could stand at the gate and see the cows in the field, but they would give us no milk for the baby." On one of their first dates, he and my mother had to leave a restaurant because they hadn't noticed the sign in the window that read "No dogs or Mexicans allowed."