Changing Awareness - Peter Seixas

So, it was very, if I were to sum up my childhood, I would say it was a very comfortable, safe, solid childhood where I had the opportunities and resources to do well at school, to have nice activities. It was—it was a good place to grow up. Now, by the later years of high school, some of the rosy picture had begun to change. The larger, historical picture had begun to change, and the way that we thought about the United States, which to me, in the growing-up years, the United States was just the obvious place to be, and it was the best, and it was the most important and, everything else was just foreign lands. By late high school, I started to have a different awareness of the—both the—domestically, what kinds of lives were available in the United States, and particularly with the beginnings of the civil rights movement, what that meant, um—and internationally, with the increasing immersion in Vietnam, and the sense that the United States wasn’t the good guy. And what did that mean for all of—the whole belief system that I had grown up with, and that was part of making my life so comfortable, up to that point.

Oral History 14.02.27PS with Peter Seixas
Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21