A new era

I lived in western North Carolina for about 3 years. When you've been raised in other areas of the country it is hard to believe the racial tensions that still prevail. To hear from friends your own age about a white high school student getting mad because his white girlfriend said a black student touched her bottom at a H.S. football game and the white boy goes to school the following Monday with a knife and stabs the black kid in the stomach. Or when your friend takes her biracial kids to the school with her for a parent teacher conference with the Kindergarten teacher and lets the kids go play on the play ground, only to find them sitting outside the room when she's done because some kids on the play ground called them the "N" word. Or when a grown black man needs to run to a junk yard far from town to find an auto part for his car and he doesn't want to go alone, he feels he needs to take a white friend with him to go to that part of town. It's sad and it's shameful that this is how parts of our country still are 150 years after slavery ended. I've been out alone with friends kids, and seen the looks other Whites give, thinking you're "white trash" and I just laugh inside! I could not be married to a more white man! But they don't know any more than what they see, me a white woman walking holding the hand of a black child.
A friend called me today and told me I needed to look at An Open Letter at the following address -http://www.theroot.com/id/48726 . I'm still sniffling. No matter what your political affiliation, you've got to admit it's a new era in America. A day has come that our grandparents couldn't even imagine. I'm happy this day has come for blacks in America, anything is possible. I hope this opens the door of possibilities not only to people of all Ethnic backgrounds but also to women and people of all faiths. Lieberman a Jew and Romney a Mormon, maybe now they won't seem like such far fetched candidates. If they're fit to lead I don't think their religion, even though it differs from mine, is a factor. I'm sure Lieberman won't make everyone eat Kosher and Romney won't make us all give up caffeine (sorry really don't know that much about Mormon do's and don'ts).It was a big deal when Kennedy was the first Catholic, but we really don't seem to have gone any further than that. What are we afraid of?