An American Jew In this great city of ours located on a great spinning ball, within a vast galaxy and an even greater universe. Sometimes we tend to take a leap into the unknown by embracing and fearing life on other planets, when we cannot embrace life or learn not to fear life on our own planet. We as a society formed our barriers when those imposed on us were removed. We rarely see mixed neighborhoods outside of major cities. Even in our neighborhood we can see it; for example Borough Park is mostly religious Jewish, the area surrounding Brooklyn College is mostly black, and Gerritsen Beach is mostly Italian. When someone who does not belong to a community invades that community, that community will fear and reject the invaders. The community is like the natives of an island, when the island receives its first visitor from outside, the natives fear the visitor and fear the change they might bring. My family was the first Russian family to move to an all Italian neighborhood, I was told to go back to where I was from "damn rooskies", the kids screamed and taunted me and my sisters. They would scream to go back to Russia even though we had never been there. But I soon made friends with a local girl who accepted me for me, not because I am Russian, but for being Diana. My parents didn't want me to get involved with the wrong kids and also feared my friendships with people from different backgrounds. But our families started talking and then we went to each other's houses for dinner and soon we were having block parties and backyard barbecues. We were no longer Russian, and they were not Italian, we had met somewhere in the middle. My mom now makes amazing lasagna and Laura's mom (the girl I became friends with) makes great chicken Kiev. We didn't belong to any class, our neighborhood was no longer Italian and it didn't become Russian, it just was. It was just a neighborhood, no classification, just a middle class neighborhood, it was gray. Gray is that color halfway between white and black, it's not black and it's not white, it's just in the middle. If you think about it there are many colors like that; take pink for example, it's a mix between red and white, it's not red and it's not elegant, it's right in the middle, it's just pink.