FROM THE EDITOR

My son Ethan doesn't attend a Quaker daycare, but the teachers ask the children to refer to one another as "friends." When my wife and I picked up Ethan one afternoon this summer, his teacher reported, giggling, that Ethan had encountered a new friend on the playground.

The new friend ran away from the monkey bars on which they were playing. Their game apparently ended too soon for my son, who — heartbroken judging from the sound of the teacher's imitation - shouted after him, "Chocolate boy. Chocolate boy, come back."

Like me, my wife gulped and tried to smile. I knew what she was thinking. What did we do to make our kid a racial profiler at four years old? But she asked the teacher, politely, "Do you think that's a problem?"

"Oh, I don't think so," she said.

Still, for a long while, it bothered me that the first thing my loving little guy noticed about his new friend was the color of his skin.

Oddly, the incident may have put me in the right frame of mind for working on this issue of the magazine. I was ready to learn 10 tips for attracting new cultural groups to park agencies (page 60). And I was very ready to listen to what Gail Ito had to say about the 'elephant in the rec center' (page 50).

I hope you find these articles as meaningful and challenging as I do. They give me insights about what it might be like to be one of the minority. Perhaps just as important, the articles make me painfully aware of how the racial, religious and lifestyle divides we face won't disappear no matter how hard we politely insist that every friend is the same.

What Ethan knows at four years old is that there is no such thing as color blindness. It's foolish and silly not to notice the obvious. The new friend is a boy. The new friend is dark skinned. All of us live and recreate in a world that is black, white, yellow, sighted, blind, able bodied, physically disabled, gay, straight, rich, poor, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, pagan, sick, well, friendly and lonesome. No magic spell erases our differences.

But why would we want it to?

What we really want, of course, is to make sure our differences don't stand in the way of making our great public agencies places where people of diverse backgrounds feel — not the same as everybody else — but as relaxed and welcome as anybody else.

Like Ethan, I suspect we all gain when the chocolate boys and vanilla girls play nice with us. And, in the same way Ethan wanted his new friend to come back to the monkey bars, I know we want our friends of all stripes to have fun, feel safe and return to our agencies again and again.

RODD WHELPLEY

Editor

www.ILparks.org September/October 2006 4