One interracial family moved from Georgia to Gilroy last year.
Since then, they said they’ve experienced racism
– and they plan to move by the end of the summer
n By Kelly Savio Staff Writer
Last year, shortly after moving to Gilroy from Georgia, A.J. Stone and his little sister, Brianna, went to summer camp so they could make new friends in their new town. While they were at camp, one of A.J.’s peers called him a nigger.
“The first day of summer camp, we were the only two black kids,” said A.J., now 12. “I felt really shy. I made a few friends that didn’t care that I was black, but then on the fourth day, we went on a hike, and this kid was looking at me, and he said, ‘Hey, look, there’s a nigger.’ It made everyone really uneasy, and some other kids told one of the counselors.”
Though Brianna, 9, never got called racial slurs, she said she didn’t like camp because she saw kids picking on A.J. and hurting his feelings.
“Moving here has been totally shocking for us,” said Sharon Stone, A.J and Brianna’s mother. “We moved to California from the South because California is always thought of as this progressive, liberal, open-minded place. We were so excited about coming here, and then this happened. You know, when we lived in Georgia, we kind of figured people talked about us behind our backs, but no one ever blatantly said something to our faces. We move here, and right off, this camp incident happened. I couldn’t believe it.”
The boy at camp who used the racial slur was expelled, but as time passed and school started, it quickly became apparent to the Stone family that the camp incident was not going to be an isolated incident.
“When I got to school, kids started calling me ‘Oreo,’ which means I’m black on the outside and white on the inside,” said A.J. “It was hard for me to make friends. I got good grades and stuff, but I was different from the white kids, so they weren’t very friendly, and I guess I talk a certain way, so the other African-American kids at my school didn’t hang out with me until I changed the way I talked and acted to be more like them. But that wasn’t really me being myself.”
Aside from the difficulties of being one of very few black residents in Gilroy, which is primarily a Caucasian and Hispanic community, A.J. and Brianna have to deal with another major factor that makes them “different”: Their parents, Sharon and Robert, are white.
“We tried to have children of our own, and when we couldn’t, we decided to adopt,” Robert said. “We wanted to do a domestic adoption because we felt there were so many children in our own country who needed homes, and the only thing we specified on the paperwork was that we wanted a healthy child. They told us that if we didn’t specify a race, we would most likely end up with an African-American child, and that was fine with us.”
And as a family, they are fine. Family pictures decorate walls and sit on end tables in the Stones’ home. Sharon and Robert go out of their way to make sure A.J. and Brianna learn about the African culture, so they have a lot of African art in their home, too. They also celebrate Kwanzaa right after Christmas, they eat a lot of Creole food, they do a special celebration on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, they’ve gone as a family to see Coretta Scott King speak, and they did a family trip to Haiti, which is where Brianna’s biological family is from.
“No matter what color our skin is, we’re just parents, and we want the same things for our children as any other parents,” Sharon said.
But this past year has been tough on the Stones. They moved here when Robert accepted a job in Salinas, and because of the discrimination they’ve experienced, Robert has asked for a transfer. The family will be moving to Chicago by summer’s end, where they said they hope they will find more diversity and more tolerance.
“I don’t like it when we go to restaurants and people turn around and stare at us,” A.J. said. “They stare at us, and no, I don’t feel like it’s just because they’re curious.”
Sharon said she tries to remind A.J. that it may really just be people’s curiosity rather than malice that makes them stare, but that’s not always an easy argument to make when he’s been on the receiving end of racially motivated derogatory comments and has had such a difficult time assimilating because of his skin color.
“We have an Asian neighbor, and he was telling me that it’s not just a black and white problem,” Robert said. “Apparently, his daughter gets called ‘Twinkie’ in school, meaning she’s yellow on the outside and white on the inside. It’s a very sad thing. We’re living in the 21st century, and you wouldn’t think this kind of discrimination would be so prevalent.”
Such blatant discrimination hasn’t always been so prevalent. Before moving to Gilroy, the Stones had experienced some intolerance, but they were just a few isolated incidents. One of the first was when Brianna was about 3 or 4 years old and A.J. was 6 or 7, and the family was living in Las Vegas. Brianna wanted to play with one of the neighbor’s children. A.J. took her over to the house, knocked on the door, and asked the man who answered if his sister could play with his little girl. The man said no, shouted obscenities, and slammed the door in A.J.’s face.
“We have had to explain to the kids that there are some people who don’t like African-Americans, or who don’t like our family, but then we remind them there are a lot of people just like mommy and daddy who don’t care about things like skin color,” Sharon said. “It’s really about how children are raised and what they’re exposed to as they grow up.”
A.J. and Brianna said it wasn’t until they were old enough to go to school that they realized their family was different from most other families. It never occurred to them that their skin should be the same color as their parents’ until they saw other children with their parents and noticed that they usually had the same color skin.
“But even then, it was OK – the kids would kind of look at me, then look at A.J. and Brianna, then look back at me, then back to the A.J. and Brianna,” Robert said. “They’d ask, ‘Are you their daddy?’ and I’d say yes, and explain that A.J. and Brianna were adopted. Then I usually had to explain adoption, but once they understood all that, the other kids accepted the explanation and were fine.”
If schools taught more about diversity and cultural acceptance, Sharon said she felt some race problems would be alleviated.
“We know we can’t sit here and say it’s just Gilroy,” she went on. “A trip to Target can show you that it’s a much bigger problem than a few communities. Trying to find black dolls for Brianna was so difficult. Other than Barbie and Bratz, you can’t really find like a baby doll. Asian dolls are even harder. And Disney is actually one of the worst – they have some diversity, but they don’t have any black princesses. Trying to find racially diverse Christmas decorations is always a challenge, too.”
Gilroy Mayor Al Pinheiro said he was sorry to hear about the problems the Stone family have encountered in Gilroy and said he whole-heartedly believes Gilroy is a community that tries to cross racial and cultural barriers.
“I know that people out there can be mean. My own son dealt with kids picking on him for many years because he has a twitch that he can’t control,” Pinheiro said. “I remember when I came here and I couldn’t speak English and I was looked at as ‘different.’ It’s hard to be different. We just have to instill in our children that you have to respect others and treat others how you would want to be treated. I think the majority of our community does embrace diversity, and I certainly know no one in our city offices would ever condone the kind of behavior this family has experienced.”
But the Stones have already begun packing up their house in preparation for their move to the Midwest.
“The most successful kids are the most well-socialized kids, and because A.J. hasn’t really been able to assimilate well, we feel like he won’t do well at Gilroy High School,” Robert said. “We’re hoping he’ll be more comfortable in the community we’re moving to in Chicago. We’ve been told it’s an open-minded community, but, of course, we’re hearing that from other white people, so who knows? We can just hope for the best.”
