Choice of Mate.

        When you look in a mirror, you naturally see yourself, so it seems to me that after a few years you accept that what you see is really okay, or of course the opposite could also happen in which case you are in real trouble. Eventually you see yourself as the norm from which you evaluate others you see. If you are black, black becomes the base color, if brown, then brown and so on. This accounts for our inherent differences in how we view each other. I remember once watching another person looking at himself in the mirror in what appeared to be total approval, while I thought he was rather gross. He had rather a large stomach, but he was patting it and turned sidewise to view it and he was smiling as if he thought it was handsome. When I was appointed as principal at Stockton, most of the children were black and on my first day I wondered if I would ever be ever be able tell the children apart, as they all appeared to look alike to me. However, in a very short time I wondered why I had ever thought that way. One day one of the children asked me if I was a teacher or the principal, he said, “all you white people look alike to me.” As they saying goes, what goes around, comes around and so it is.