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VY: Well, let's see. Is there anything about Chicago, growing up in Chicago that you would like to talk about before we move on to things you did later in life? I know you went to college.

DC: Yeah, that's sort of... I graduated salutatorian, and I knew that I didn't have a very good background going to university because I had gone to a school that was not very academically-oriented. And I really had wanted to go to a private school like my niece had, and I was deprived of that opportunity. And so I don't recall really being a very happy adolescent, but I learned many things at Wells High School that I value today, and that has to do with the people that went there. And there were many Polish people there, and they fed into Wells High School, and there were many black people and many Italians, and many people who were of immigrant background. And there were many tensions between those populations, but I managed to get along relatively well with everyone. And I take what I know now about the people that were certainly less advantaged, less privileged than the people who would have gone to someplace like Francis Parker, that they're great people, that their struggles are important. And I think what was very important for me to witness at Wells High School was the treatment of, I guess, the African Americans. And I remember one fellow being in my class and being mistreated by the teacher, and I knew he was being discriminated against, and I said nothing. And I think I was so interested in my own, my furthering myself, that I forgot about my obligations to stick up for people who were less privileged than I was.

And it's a very interesting thing about ambition and wanting to be a model minority, which I often talk about because this is a temptation for people who've been discriminated against to be accepted. And so you often... what's the word? You distort your values, you compromise, you prostitute your values, which you know are so integral to who you are in your own history, to ambition. And so I wanted to go to college and I wanted to do well, and I wasn't going to sacrifice my status in the classroom to stick up for this one individual. And I never even said anything to him. So in that sense I was denying his humanity, and I'm sorry for that. And this is a very interesting topic. So I think that there are other ambitions that are important to pursue over being accepted. I think those ambitions have to do with following your insights as my husband calls it. I had that insight that that black child was being discriminated against and I denied that insight that I had.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.