By Gene Barton

The subject of this month’s Diversity issue prompts me to reflect on my own upbringing and five decades of life experiences that began in Small Town, U.S.A., and progressed through this country’s largest city, the near South, the melting pot of the Southwest and the diverse student body at the U.W. Law School.

“Hey, white boy!” is not much as racial epithets go, but it’s the worst I was ever likely to hear growing up in the “white bread” world of the Washington-Idaho Palouse country during the 1960s and ‘70s. The Palouse of 30 and 40 years ago was farm and cowboy country. Arch conservative. Lily white.

I had one African American classmate in middle school in Pullman and one -- whose father was a professor at the University of Idaho -- in high school in Moscow, but her family moved before our senior year. I had one minority teacher, Dr. Cha, who taught calculus my senior year. There were 180-some students in my senior class and every one of them, save the exchange student from Thailand and one East Indian, was white.

I grew up white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and Republican. I was your prototypical WASP; although, after a divorce, my mother converted me to Catholicism when I was 8. It was an extremely sheltered existence where racial epithets were the order of the day. My father is from Oklahoma; his father was from Alabama; my mother’s father from North Carolina. It was, essentially, a Southern household transplanted to the Great Northwest.

Filbert nuts, with their peculiar shape and color, were referred to in my house as “nigger toes.” In the “eenie, meenie, miney, mo” game, we caught “a nigger by the toe.” And so on. My family and I thought nothing of it. My father, however, did not typically refer to African Americans using the “N” word; but I did, once, in a pique during a flag football game in middle school. I flung it at my only African American classmate, Roy, after a rough play. It hardly caused a stir. I have come to rue that moment, which is one of my great regrets in life; one I remember almost 40 years later instead of many, many pleasant, long-lost memories.

My wake-up call and practical education in racial, ethnic and sexual diversity began in 1978, when I finally left Moscow. I spent the summer after my high school graduation in Manhattan, staying with, Ron, an old friend of my mother. He was gay. I hardly knew what that meant back then.

I met many of his friends and was, essentially, introduced to New York City’s burgeoning gay community. Gordon, a co-worker in the travel agency where Ron worked and had gotten me a job, also was gay. He invited me to dinner at his house in Flushing where I met his mother and his partner. Later, toward the end of the summer, I joined the three of them at their lake cabin in upstate New York where we passed part of the time watching the Watergate hearings. That summer was the greatest experience of my life.

That fall, I enrolled at the University of Missouri where I saw the good, the bad and the ugly. Racial conflicts were not unusual. I made a concerted effort to make friends with the three African-Americans on my dorm floor, as did others. But when Chris vehemently resisted our efforts to indoctrinate him with a “Cook County,” a dog-pile ritual imported by one of my Chicago-area dormmates (and to which I already had been subjected), we almost caused a riot.

After two years back in Moscow, at the U of I, I eventually finished up my journalism degree at Missouri and wound up with a newspaper in Albuquerque, which, in 1978, had distinct and virtually segregated populations of Anglo-American and Hispanic Caucasians, Afri-can-Americans and Native Americans.

I got my next lesson in racial and ethnic sensitivity there. The journalistic style of the time was to refer to non-Hispanic Caucasians as Anglos, not “whites,” when discussing racial distinctions. Trouble was, nobody told me this. I used the terms “white” and “Hispanic” as distinctive terms in the same sentence and the copy desk, which should have known the rule, didn’t catch the error. But I caught the heat.

Fast forward to U.W. Law School in 1995, where one of my Asian classmates admonished me, at almost 40 years of age, for using the term “Oriental” in class. She was right and the incident was forgotten; we were later lab partners. But, as worldly as I thought I was at the time, it was not until then that I finally expunged the last vestige of my sheltered childhood.

Over the years, I have learned that my sister is a lesbian; she and her partner have been together for more than 20 years. They live in France. My sister-in-law also is a lesbian. She and her partner were joined in a civil union several years ago and had a brief marriage in Portland last year before the same-sex marriages in Multnomah County were expunged. They have had two daughters by artificial insemination.