The color of your socks matters

I started my education at the public elementary school on the Fort Sam Houston Army base in San Antonio, TX.  There is a photo of me at the age of six headed off to school in jeans, a t-shirt, and white socks, a typical outfit for Army brats in the 1960’s.  Several years later, my family moved to Columbus, OH, where I attended St. Catherine’s Catholic school.  This school required that every student wear a uniform consisting of a white shirt and blue pants.  I continued to wear white socks as I had in Texas, but after several weeks, one of the nuns who taught at the school informed me that the uniform requirement also specified dark socks.  So that night I asked my mother to buy me a supply of blue socks lest I stand out from everyone else in the school.  After several years, we moved again, this time to New Orleans, LA.  Here I attended Holy Name of Jesus Catholic school which also had a uniform requirement – white shirt and khaki pants as it was too hot to wear dark pants in this climate.  I continued to wear blue socks as I had in Columbus, but soon after I arrived, one of my new classmates announced, “You know, only n******s wear colored socks.  If you want to fit in with white folks, you need to wear white socks.”   Hmmm, I had discarded all the white socks I wore in Texas because they were not useful in Ohio.  Now I couldn’t wear any of the colored socks I bought in Ohio.  Mortified that I would be mistaken for a person of color, I hurried home after school and convinced my mother to resupply my sock drawer with white stockings.  Then, in the early 1970’s I moved again, this time to Nashville, TN, where I attended a private school for boys. There was no uniform requirement, so I wore casual slacks, a collared shirt and the white socks I had acquired in New Orleans.  It didn’t take long, however, before the boy who sat behind me in homeroom announced that only rednecks wore white socks.  “We wear colored socks,” he explained.  "Here we go again," I thought.  This secret societal sock stipulation was clearly ridiculous.  I had changed my socks more often than anyone else in the school, perhaps the entire city, and it hadn't changed my personality or my outlook on life, at least as far as I could tell.  I had hoped that people would judge me by the content of my character rather than the color of my socks.  But I was wrong.  Perhaps it was a conspiracy instigated by sock manufacturers to increase the demand for hosiery.  Maybe I should just wear flip-flops.