DATE: Saturday, June 7, 1997                TAG: 9706070747

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Anne Saita

                                            LENGTH:   57 lines

LET'S TEACH OUR CHILDREN TO LIVE IN HARMONY, NOT PERISH AS FOOLS.

Three years ago, I stood in a supermarket express checkout line and noticed a seemingly abandoned cart in front of me holding 16 items. The limit was 10.

I normally wouldn't mind, but this time I was in a hurry. When a middle-aged woman returned to the cart with even more stuff, I told her she was in the wrong line.

She, in turn, told me I was out of line.

``I have only two hands,'' she repeatedly said and refused to budge. Then she accused me of picking on her because she was black and I was white.

I kept quiet, and she checked out in front of me. But the scene, though never repeated, has never left me. Cries of racism - some warranted, some not - have surfaced often in the communities I have covered these past four years.

I have met with black and white parents who shared the same fear for their children's safety after racial tensions flared up at a local high school.

I have stood in the middle of a heated civil rights rally sparked by a white commissioner's insulting joke to a black sheriff. I felt the crowd's anger, but I also felt safe despite being the only white person in the place.

I have talked to African-American workers who claim their employer treated them unfairly because of their ethnicity. I have heard from their Caucasian counterparts who said they, too, felt discriminated against during promotions.

High school students last week privately accused one another of standing up for racism, rather than principles, at a peaceful protest. It's a refrain I've heard all too frequently.

My job has allowed me access into the households of some of the area's wealthiest white families and its poorest blacks. Each has treated me with hospitality and some degree of friendliness.

I remember one elderly black woman who tended to let her family do the talking, but whose parting words spoke volumes about our racial history. ``I like you,'' she softly said as I started to leave. ``You treat us like people, not dogs.''

A few days ago, I left an elementary school where kids I'd seen playfully eating together as kindergartners had since segregated themselves in the cafeteria only a few years later.

I was looking at our future. But it looked more like a scene from our past.

It's time we paid more attention to what we say and do around our children. Maybe then this mixed salad we call America will not leave so many with a bitter taste.

Let's teach them how, through our votes and our voices, we can change the rules if enough of us don't like them. Maybe then, through honoring those changes, political and socioeconomic balances will be gained or restored.

Let's help them learn that respect is not an entitlement but a privilege earned and sometimes lost. Maybe then a person's character, not just his or her complexion, will be considered before passing judgment.

Let's warn them that mistakes are part of the process, that we must choose our battles wisely and that you can challenge someone's arithmetic in a supermarket checkout and end up taking on something far more.

Then maybe, just maybe, we'll live in a world where everyone counts.

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