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Informationen zum Autor Laurel Holliday has a private psychotherapy practice in Seattle, USA. Formerly a teacher and editor she now writes full time and is the author of three previous books in the Children in Conflict series: , including CHILDREN IN THE HOLOCAUST AND WORLD WAR II: THEIR SECRET DIARIES published by Piatkus, CHILDREN OF THE TROUBLES published by Pocket isbn 0 671 537385 and CHILDREN OF THE DREAM published by Pocket isbn 0 671 00803X Klappentext In this young adult anthology, many people of color share their stories of oppression, discrimination, and triumph. “I constantly questioned myself as a child. All of the positive images of people I’d seen were white. To be beautiful, you not only had to be stick-skinny, with no behind, you had to have long silky blond hair and blue eyes, a thin nose, and thin lips. I just didn’t measure up.” —Charisse Nesbit, Maryland These true stories from every part of America tell what it was like growing up in world where the color of people’s skin set them apart. How do you feel when a teacher doesn’t believe that you wrote the story he thinks is great? How can you make friends and belong in a black school when your father is black and your mother is Puerto Rican? What do you do when you’re working in the kitchen of a summer camp in Vermont, but you’re not allowed to swim in the camp lake? All the writers’ pain, confusion, humiliation, and rage are vividly expressed, but many of them went on to realize their dreams against overwhelming odds. Their voices offer hope, inspiration, and a challenge to us all. CHAPTER 1 - Amitiyah Elayne Hyman A minister in the Presbyterian church for eighteen years, Amitiyah Elayne Hyman began her own company called SpiritWorks in Washington, D.C., in 1998. Consulting with individuals and institutions, she designs prayers and rituals that assist people with self-acceptance, self-love, and the ability to be open and vulnerable to others. As a "mixed-blood woman," she brings African, Native American, and European traditions together in her rituals. Amitiyah's writing also serves as a healing ritual. "Racism fed a cycle of abuse in which I was trapped as a child," she says, "and writing out this story helped me to heal from that abuse." In this true story she revisits the horror she felt in 1948, when she was first forced to defend herself against a racial epithet. When I asked Amitiyah for her thoughts about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream, she said that it is no longer applicable. "The twenty-first century will be the time for people of color, the earth's majority, to come into their own. King's dream is too small for the future." sticks and stones and words and bones We only met outside, in air that was cold and stung our faces, or in warm breezes that invited us to catch lightning bugs before bedtime. We cherished these sidewalk encounters, escapes from overheated kitchens and sun-starved hallways, an older sister's bossiness, and forced afternoon naps. They made us feel special, adventurous, beyond the limits imposed on kindergartners in a steel-workers' town on the Ohio River in 1948. We would sit on the steps of the house between our two houses?a buffer zone that held our little end of the block, of blue collars and rednecks and black professionals, together. Swaddled in maroon corduroy leggings or knee-padded overalls, blue wool peacoats, rubber boots, and mismatched mittens that never wanted to stay on our hands, we enjoyed each other. Passersby might have guessed that we were the best of friends, or cousins perhaps, from the way we whispered and laughed into each other's faces in the middle of winter. They would have missed that our faces were the colors of sweet vanilla and caramel cream, that my thick dark braids were rebelliously unraveling in the moist heat of my scalp, and that her short, straight blond hair was stringy and wet i...
