People Like Us.
by Liv | Published on October 5th, 2009, 7:42 am | Travel
It's so funny when I think about where I live, and where I want to live. Here I am, a living metaphor for diversity in an area which tolerates alternative life about as much as the republicans do socialized medicine. I live in a gender bending, same sex relationship which just also happens to be bi-racial. I grew up NC, Shannon in CA. She's Mexican, French and Irish. I'm Welsh, & German.
Here we are in lunch counter land, a city apologizing every few years for an event that occurred several decades ago. I could go on and on, but I'm not. You get it. I was reminded about where I live when several weeks ago, a fellow blogger, whom I carried out what I thought was a online friendship with, turned bitter and mean because she couldn't handle we live in the 21st century.
Now I'm not saying life is perfect, or the grass is greener on the other side, okay yes I am, (let me dream) but when we landed in Cardiff last year, we walked out on the docks and there was this (above). It's a statue called "People Like Us", and as you can see it portrays a mixed race couple... just like us. We thought "Wow, cool!"
See while we (Greensboro) was running around in white hoods shooting people, over in Cardiff the city became a diverse combination of families comprised of different colors and backgrounds as people rushed to the city during it's coal boom. Butetown, the area around Cardiff Bay (formally named Tiger Bay) became a boom town for diversity. I was lucky enough to watch a documentary a few weeks back whom interviewed a daughter of a bi-racial couple and she said "No one thought anything of it, as my [black] mother and [white] father walked with me down the street."
"Wow" I thought. "Wow. People like us."