Not the same for our kids as it was for us

I was listening to NPR the other morning, and they were talking to someone of African American descent talking about how difficult it was to explain to his children about racism and the battles that African Americans had to deal with in American society.  He used the President as an example.  For his kids, the President of the United States is African American, to them there was never a time when the President was anything but African American, so they take it for granted, that it's something easily attained, that there isn't discrimination to get to that position.

For Lauren, I feel it's something similar.  For her, her peers are every ethnicity imaginable.  The world is multi-cultured and diverse, and it's never been anything else for her.  While she understands that there's conflict and war in some parts of the world, it's never really touched her personally.

Just this morning, we were talking about China, and she didn't realize there was a time when people in the U.S. couldn't go to China.  I had to explain to her about Nixon going to China and opening up the doors for others to visit the country.  And I told her about her about her grandfather starting up the "Summer in China" program in his University that was one of the earliest visits to China by foreigners around 1980, and how he went every summer, and brought her grandmother with him a few times as well.

The world has advanced so much since I was a kid, and Lauren gets to benefit from it, but I fear that if she doesn't know the history of what it took to get us here, her generation may be doomed to repeat some of the problems I experienced growing up.