When I was a little girl one time after we went to Walmart, my dad sat down with me at the KFC

that was right across the parking lot. And as we were eating, he explained to me that while he

wasn't racist, he didn't think that races should marry each other because it was too hard on the

kids. The kids wouldn't be able to adapt. And they'd be bullied because they wouldn't fit in

with either group.

When I got a little bit older, he would say phrases like cotton picker, and I didn't really

register what it was he was talking about. He repeatedly claimed that the Civil War was about

states' rights, and when I asked him the right to do what, he got pretty upset.

And I carried these ideas into my late teens and my early 20s.

And I would have never said, I'm not racist.

I love everyone.

I even used the horrible condescending phrase, I'm colorblind, which is insane.

And as I started to realize that what I had been told was a lie, and I found out about things like the Tulsa Massacre, and I realized just how much of my history that I'd been taught as a kid

had been whitewashed and how much had been missed. My family never taught me about the civil rights

movement. My dad demonized Martin Luther King Jr. I started to realize

I'm missing something and I started to realize that attitudes I had towards people I had never met

were wrong. They were not just wrong morally. They were incorrect. And I started to do a lot of

searching online to answer questions, everything from what happened in the civil rights movement.

What did Dr. Martin Luther King really say? What does racism really look like in America?

And one of the first videos I stumbled upon was an interview with Jane Elliott as she explained

her brown and blue eye exercise. And I started to cry because she

explained it in a way that made me understand what prejudice looks like and that we don't have to

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