reverse psychology

i watched an old episode of "The Sopranos" last night on A&E. carmela said something to tony that made me think a little deeper about my last post. their young daughter was starting to date a half jewish and half black boy and tony had a fit. carmela told tony that the more he made a stink about it, the more he would push his daughter right into the young boy's arms.

couple of things. i had this conversation with my dentist, whose wife is black. he started dating black women because he came from a hick town with no black people and his mother was always bad talking black people in front of him. that created a natural curiosity about black people. were they really as bad as he had been led to believe? and then, BAM. he fell in love with one. the same type of thing happened with my husband. and in high school, i distinctly remember "play" dating a white boy, and when it seemed to get "serious", his friend told me that his father was totally racist. this white boy that i was hanging out with was always dating black girls. go figure.

i've seen that a lot though. so it made me think of my conversation with my son's schoolmate's mom. i mean, what better way to insure your kids don't marry someone of a different race (if one is so inclined) than to put them into a school with lots and lots of diversity. i guess it's kinda reverse psychology. i mean, if a kid goes to a school with lots of people unlike himself, he's unlikely to be so curious and seek them out. they wont seem so interesting.

i've thought about this with my son. i think i blogged about it before, when i was toying with the idea of putting him into private schools way out somewhere, outside the close-in city. i decided against it for now, because of all the black boys that i knew of growing up whose parents decided to either live someplace like lakeoswego or beaverton, or to send them to school way out, they had a hard time. the thing was, the black boys had a great time in school until the typical teenage years when lots of boys, even white boys want to listen to rap and hiphop and be cool. but the black boys, they didn't quite know how to act and felt like they were missing out on being "black" in the hood. so they'd start coming over to NE portland, hanging out with the WRONG crowd, but not seeming to know the difference. i guess they figured when they hung out with a thug, that was just "being black".

anyway, long story short, those black boys, the ones whose parents had made such painstaking efforts to keep them away from the hood, were the ones who got into serious trouble. so with my son, i figure, he will be raised in a stable home, read books, have both parents around, etc, etc. even in his class now there are kids who don't come from the most stable home.

as he gets older and sees drug activity and bad behavior, etc., hopefully it wont seem so exciting or intriguing to him.