Duff McKagan’s column runs every Thursday on Reverb.It may be suggested to enter this read under ‘RAMBLE’ in your file of an already busy and confused Web world. The point, I am afraid, never becomes crystal clear in this piece. I hope only that it provokes some thought.I said in last week’s column that we had made the wisest choice in Obama for our next U.S. president. In saying that, I also meant that we weren’t just voting for social change, we were putting the right man in office, period. I would be remiss not to mention, however, some views that I believe are shared by many on race relations- and the evolution thereof- in our country up to this point.

In 1969, I started kindergarten here in Seattle, and it happened to be the same year that desegregation started in our public school system (also known as ‘busing’). Now, all I knew was that black kids from Madrona Elementary got sent to my school (Bryant), while white kids from Bryant got sent to Madrona. The kids who got to ride the bus were seen as ‘cool’ and grown up and that was the end of our ‘little kid’ conceptions. You see, we were far too young to have any racial stereotype preconceptions. The kids that I matriculated elementary school with stayed pretty much the same through Eckstein Middle to Roosevelt High. We would hear of race ‘wars’ in the upper schools but we younger kids were largely aloof and mystified by them (try being 6 and hearing of something called “White Rabbit” day, a pre-set race rumble at Eckstein! We actually thought it was a running race!). I think when forced busing started in the upper schools that year; the older kids already had started to form their thoughts (or, more likely, their parents’ thoughts) about racial hatred and the like. On top of all this, one of my older sisters, Carol, had married a black man in the mid-sixties and had their first son (my first nephew) when I was two years old. They had a daughter 2 years after that. Furthermore, my brother-in-law, Dexter (their dad), was the coolest guy around and I wanted to be like him. I knew that I would get angry when someone used the ‘N’ word around me, but I wasn’t sure why. (Years later, when Axl used it in a GNR song, I would however defend his artistic freedom as he used it in a wry and 3rd person context. It was, for me, ironic to say the least). I certainly didn’t understand that a civil rights movement was taking place. I only marched with my mom in the “Martin Luther King Peace March” when he died because I knew that I would get to miss school that day!Racial borders meant very little to me. It was only in the 6th grade that some real bullshit entered my world. I had a friend named Willie and we were goofing around at our lockers. Some hard-ass school counselor came around the corner and caught us. We were both taken to the office and our parents were called. My mom left work to come to my school and talk to the administration while I was kept in another room by myself. When it was over, I was kicked out of school for 3 days due to, get this, a racially motivated fight! Willie and I were stunned and ashamed. My mother said that people were still stuck in old ways of thinking and that they didn’t have the means to just see two kids ‘messing around’, they could only see a ‘black’ kid and a ‘white’ kid fighting! It was like a veil has suddenly been lifted for me and I could see for the first time, bigotry and ignorance, both black and white.We kids, however, still had each other, and we all tried our best to block out the grown-up world and their old ways of thinking. There were younger kids now coming up behind us with still younger parents. It seemed that by the time the kids from the mid to late 60’s started to have kids of their own, starting in the early Eighties, bigotry from parents really started to fall off. There were more and more inter-racial parents and therefore there were more and more racially mixed kids popping up. America was truly becoming the melting pot.

There was still an “old guard” if you will. Men and women from our “Greatest Generation” that could not get out from under their old ways of thinking and the stereotypes that they were raised with. It is and was not their fault. Babies are not born with hatred or bias. It is taught. This is not just a white thing, either. The older black generation have and had such mistrust and fear of the white man and their apparatus that they in turn taught this to their young. These generations are now dying off. It is our turn to stem the tide and forget the past. Am I asking to forget that this country of so-called ‘liberty’ was started with slavery intact? No. But we, of this generation have started to simply move on. Is there total equality at the workplace? I certainly doubt it. Again, our generation is doing better than the one before it.One of my great-nephews (a wonderful mix of intelligence, poise, humor, and race) attends Kent-Meridian High School. It is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse schools in the Northwest. I asked him what it was like and how well kids mixed together there. “Well Uncle Duff, what do you mean?”“I mean, do kids from different races and ethnicities hang out together?” I said.“Uh, yeah, we go to the same school and if you come down here looking for different colors and such you will get confused”“Confused?”“Yeah, it’s like a rainbow, we all hang out together”“Well cool” I thought to myself. Just as we were about to hang up, he chimed in with a parting warning.“Its not like this everywhere” He went on to tell that one of my other great-nephews (who is also ‘mixed’) gets stares and glares at his high-school on Camano Island. I guess our rural hinterland is still catching up. It kind of bummed me out.Sometimes I feel that friends look at me as an idealist. I sometimes hope for more than is actually ‘practical’ to hope for. Obama came into our collective vision at the right time. Our economy is in shambles, we are fighting TWO wars, oil prices reached all-time highs, and new clean energy sources were not getting looked into. We needed something fresh. I also believe that the days of out-of-touch old guys in politics are coming to an end. I just hope other out-of-touch ideas and biases will also soon come to an end.