My parents and grandparents had a very strong work ethic, along with strong beliefs about other cultures and races. I was raised to respect others, to believe in the American dream, and to live by the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). Growing up in the 60's my parents were very protective and I was not exposed to or aware of the civil unrest going on in our country. The only references to ethnicity were generalizations about nationality: Italians were good Catholics, Poles were hard workers, or Germans made good sausages. My maternal grandmother emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1923 and was discriminated against when she was a young Irish woman living in New York City. He had little tolerance for those who complained about cultural discrimination, believing it was a rite of passage as an immigrant, and if you worked hard you would be rewarded. As a child and young adult, my world was culturally very small. I lived in a small, predominantly white, Christian town. My family had a summer home in New Hampshire, so my travels were limited to the East Coast. Similar to Chimamanda Adichie's discussion (TED Talks, 2009) in the video “The Danger of a Single Story,” for most of my formative years, I had a cultural history, my