I have had the opportunity to share the story of the Omaha DePorres Club nearly fifty times over the last several years. Many of those presentations have been for elementary and middle school students. These younger students almost always have some version of the same question at the end of my presentation; “Why do people think they are better than or treat some people as less than them because of skin color?” At this point my time is usually up, so I gently respond, “That is a good question. It’s called racism,” and leave it at that.
As we sat down to dinner last night my daughter was humming a tune in her lovely eleven-year-old voice. She paused and asked, “Did you know there is a black national anthem?” She explained that her chorus group was going to sing it at her middle school for an assembly. This led to a conversation about racism, which she closed emphatically with her opinion of racism; “Whoever thought of that or started that is just stupid.”
I recently came across an Omaha World-Herald article from December of 1996 about a group of McMillan Middle School students and a project they were involved in documenting the history of North 24th Street. As the students had encountered abandoned building after abandoned building and vacant lot after vacant lot, they asked why these homes of former businesses hadn’t stayed open. They also asked why they hadn’t been replaced.
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