Your Opinion: Racial undertones

Dear Editor:

I was born the same year that the National Guard were called out to integrate black students into Central High School in Little Rock.

My parents were very forward thinking given the time period we were living in. My father was a manager with IBM in Tulsa, Okla., during the "60s and he had two black men who worked under his supervision at a time when there was a great deal of racial unrest and violence in the country.

While Tulsa was not exactly a hotbed of racial strife at the time, it is a city located in what many consider to be a southern state where there was not a great deal of diversity with the exception of the Indian population.

He treated these men with respect and made sure that they were treated fairly by their co-workers. In addition to this he always spoke highly of them and their families. This was a great example for my sister and I to be exposed to and I am very grateful to have had the benefit of this wisdom while in my youth.

When I think about the fact that within the relatively short span of my life, the country has gone from Little Rock to having a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as our president, I am pretty amazed. I have to say though that the divisiveness and racial undertones of this election cycle has led me to question how we, as a country, are going to handle the inevitable change of demographics in this century. Protestants are now in the minority and last year the births of minorities exceeded that of whites.