I was fairly new to this particular school since my parents only moved to the area. There was a boy, who, as it turned out, was an orphan and was living and working for a small farming family. He didn't appear at first glance to ever be fully engaged  in the school learning process;he would sit quietly, never seem to get any attention from the teacher, and would spend a lot of time staring out of the window just behind him. Over the next few weeks, I got to know this boy while playing outside in the schoolyard playing baseball, or soccer. He was very athletic and very good at anything we played. I started to wonder why he didn't seem to do well in school and why the teacher ignored him. He told me he had been in several foster   homes since he was a little boy and that most of his time in the last few years had always been on farms. He said he was made to work before he went to school and as soon as he got home until it was time for bed. He was never given a chance to go out and play, nor was he allowed to have any friends although he told me he really didn't have any friends anyway, because he was an orphan and they did not want anything to do with him. I had never before been acquainted with prejudice of any kind. Here was one characteristic of a human being who through no fault of his own carried a label that prevented him from even having friends as a child. His potential was also being ignored by the teacher. It wasn't that he couldn't learn, or didn't want to -- it was because he wasn't encouraged or in some cases, allowed to. We may all meet people through the years that we tend to apply labels   to without really taking the time to get to know them, to discover their real potential because our vision is clouded by how we always put people into _ that we are used to or comfortable with. The boy's potential was ignored because  _  .
He worked hard. He liked playing baseball.. He was athletic. He was an orphan.