You’re a Racist, Charlie Brown?

On the belated controversy over a 45-year-old cartoon.

I’ll never forget the time someone disinvited me from a party because I’m black. It was back when I was a seventh-grade student at Denn John Middle School in Kissimmee, Florida. One of my white classmates invited me to a party she was throwing at her house, but days before the event, she told me it was cancelled.

Shortly after she broke the news, another friend, who also was white, gave me a disturbing piece of intel. According to her, the party was still on, but the classmate throwing the party was too embarrassed to tell me that her mother didn’t want a black kid in her house. She demanded that her daughter disinvite me or call it off.

My classmate chose door number one, and I never told her that I knew. I was pretty sure I didn’t miss much, but the rejection stung.

I recovered fairly quickly and went about my tween life (to this day, I remain friends with both classmates), but I thought about that old sting this Thanksgiving when I read about the latest racism uproar. It concerned the 45-year-old seasonal animated special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and the secondary character Franklin, the only black friend in the Peanuts bunch.