My Dyslexia, by Philip Schultz. This Pulitzer Prize winning poet describes growing up being assumed, and believing himself, to be dumb: it was not until he was 58, when his 2nd grade son was diagnosed with dyslexia, that he realized that he too was dyslexic. He describes how his non-diagnosis led to him acting out, to covering in many ways, to loving books but disliking reading, to discovering ways to teach writing (he created a Writers Studio). Ironically, his publisher, Norton, seems to have a disability, as well: it let slip a misspelling (dyslexia) and a blurb implying that he won a Nobel Prize in science rather than poetry. Gail Mazur loaned me this book (she knows the author).

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. I finally read this 1998 Kingsolver novel (and an earlier one, as well) but soon put it down — who knows why. This time it grabbed me, in part because the narrators alternated between five female characters, a Rashomon-like format that fascinates me. A fundamentalist Baptist minister takes his four daughters to an isolated village in the Congo, just as the Belgian colonizers (who used to cut off mineworkers’ hands if they didn’t meet quota) hand over control, and the people elect Patrice Lumumba, who the U.S. soon after arranges to be killed. The saga goes from 1959 to the 80s. It’s an excoriating vision of clueless, ineffectual Christian missionaries, of racial prejudice that personal interactions (except in the father’s case) break down, of individual women whose talents and goals and thoughts remain largely unsaid, but are eventually fulfilled. I wanted to finish the 530 page book by the end of our stay, so I raced through the last 100 pages, but the rich portrayal of each person’s experience and of the dynamics and consequences of colonialism will stay with me. Kingsolver funded (until recently, through the National Writers Union’s Service Organization) the Bellwether Prize: $25,000 plus publication of a fiction mss. with social justice themes.

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, by Amy Alexander (Beacon Press, 2011). Alexander used to live in Cambridge: I read her the book she co-wrote with Dr. Alvin Poussaint on African Americans and suicide, Lay My Burden Down. She wrote for the San Francisco Examiner while still in college, risked danger to cover the 1991 L.A. “riots” for the Sacramento Bee, only to have a copyeditor insert “savage” and “rampaging” into her otherwise carefully reported article. She later writes for the Miami Herald, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She names what the few publishers who effectively diversified their staffs did so: by tying news managers’ raises and bonuses, in part at least, to the rates of minority hiring and retention. She is frank in her evaluation of the National Association of Black Journalists, calling it “toothless” except for its professional training programs.

Learning From the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer, by John Maher (self-published 2011). I don’t remember how I heard of my neighbor’s book but the title intrigued me: what can we learn from the Sixties? He grew up with an Irish-background poor to riches businessman father, which gave him some economic leeway to devote much of his life to organizing. He was an organizer of SDS, Vietnam Summer, Neighbor to Neighbor, and also taught English in the Somerville schools. To organize lower-income people, he worked for awhile in a Cambridge manufacturing plant, but stopped because it felt inauthentic (he hid his Harvard background). Each chapter ends with a list of principles/practices he learned in each organizing effort. He is frank about the mistakes he made, but also clear about one-on-one, door-to-door, in-person dialogue that he sees essential. His FBI file is 2000 pages long (maybe in part because his brother was an open Communist Party member). I may have been one of the people he recruited to go door-to-door to rally opposition to the Vietnam War (and later to get rent controlled passed in Cambridge, although I don’t remember him.

Lone Holdout: A Memoir, by Linda Cox (Charles Street Press, 2010). Cox worked in the editorial department of an unnamed Boston publisher for 12 years, but after a successful class action sex discrimination case in which she was one of five named plaintiffs, she became co-owner of a Charles Street (Beacon Hill) bookstore. She describes serving on a jury for the first time and becoming the one jurist who doubted the prosecutions’ police witnesses. The book goes through the testimony, noting her questions and doubts. On trial was a young Dominican immigrant, charged with selling drugs and weapons violations. Her refusal to convict caused a hung jury: the young man was then retried and convicted. Convinced of the imprisoned man’s innocence, she rounded up pro bono lawyers and raised money to pay for private detectives. A judge finally granted a motion for a new trial, based on documentation of exculpatory evidence, and the inherent unreliability of single-witness identification cases. The arresting officer was proved to be a rogue cop who had been the subject of 27 internal investigations (for brutality, extorting money and sex from drug dealers and their girlfriends, etc.). He was convicted of attempted extortion and larceny and got a 4-6 year prison term. Cox is honest about the young man she defended: after 18 months in prison, he couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. After taking a ride with someone who had drugs in car, he was sent to prison for a year and then deported to Dominican Republic. This case happened in 1988: it took Cox 20 years to write the book, which was almost made into the film, but in the end was self-published. I read self-published books by people I know because I like to make up my mind about their quality, and not react to mainstream-media hype.

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka (Knopf, 2011) another 2011 National Book Award fiction finalist. It, too, is written unconventionally: in the first person plural (“We”). I doubted this would work in a novel, but it does. This the story of “picture brides” brought from Japan to the U.S. early in the 20th century, by Japanese men seeking wives. The “we” form lets us see their commonality but also to appreciate their diversity, and their individual ways of coping.

A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle. Jon and I both read this raucus novel while we were in Dublin. [Jon “It gave me a real feeling for what life in Dublin was like, and fit what I saw there”]. Henry and his brother Victor are street urchins whose one-legged assassin dad and crazy, alcoholic mother, had more kids than they can care for. The boys turn to robbery and are eventually recruited into Michael Collins’ revolutionaries. They take part in the Post Office rebellion against the British, and then face retaliation. Jon will read another in Doyle’s novel series on our post-Christmas reading weekend.

The Irish Famine, by Peter Grey (Thames & Hudson). This book was an eye-opener: the Irish Famine was not just a matter of a failed potato harvest, as I had always thought. The famine could have been averted if farmers were allowed to grow other crops but the British plantation owners insisted that they export all non-potato foods to Britain, while 1 million Irish died of starvation and sickness, and another 1 million fled the county for the U.S., cutting Ireland’s population in half and leading to a long period of poverty, which may have affected my great-grandmother, Winifred Flanagan Moore, born in 1850 in Mayo County.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Reb ecca Skloot (Crown, 2010). Scientists have been using “HeLa” cells since the 1950s. This is the story of an African American woman whose cells, after she died of cervical cancer, were reproduced by scientists who went on to develop the polio vaccine and other medical advances. This was before informed consent regulations, so it’s also the history of bad scientific/medical practices, especially towards people of color, an example of scientists’ incompetence at communicating with non-scientists, and the story of Lacks’ daughter’s determined to understand the science her mother’s cells were part of, and to have that contribution honored.

Nemesis, by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). A short novel set in New Jersey and in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. It made me understand the epidemic that caused our mother to make us wear gloves whenever we went to “the city” and to take us to the country – not just for fun but to keep us safe. The novel also shows how polio victim “cripples’ were hidden away and how suspected “carriers” were shunned.

Knowing Jesse: A Mother’s Story of Grief, Grace, and Everyday Bliss, by Marianne Leone (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The author spoke about her memoir at a National Writers Union program. What impressed me was the ferocity of her love and determination that her son Jesse, born with cerebral palsy, which left him paraplegic, subject to seizures and unable to speak, be recognized as smart, talented, and capable to being mainstreamed at school, where he excelled at both Latin and poetry. The author is married to the actor, Chris Cooper (they live in our area).

Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, by Augustus A. White III, M.D. , with David Chanoff (Harvard University Press, 2011). Dr. White is Professor of Medical Education and Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the first African American department chief at Harvard’s teaching hospitals. He shows how unconscious bias persists and leads to gender, race and age health disparities. He reports double-blind studies: one in which when men and women report similar heart symptoms and stresses in their lives, doctors are more likely to believe that the men had organize heart disease but that the women’s stress was due to psychological disorders. Another: doctors in hospitals call white patients Mr. or Mrs. and draw curtains to protect their privacy during breast exams, but those same doctors call Black patients by their first names and do not bother to draw privacy curtains. Dr. White also describes bias he faced in the course of his career.

Finding Oprah’s Roots – Finding Your Own, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Crown, 2007) I just finished this fascinating account (also shown on TV) of the search for Oprah’s ancestors, via documents and DNA. It made me realize the significance for African Americans of recovering – and honoring – and being inspired by – ancestors who managed to get an education, buy land, and build careers, despite the barriers of legal and interpersonal racism. It made me want to know more about my ancestors: to find inspiring models among them.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander (New Press, 2010). Alexander was a keynote speaker at an anti-racism conference I attended. She documents how President Reagan’s “War on Drugs” targeted communities of color and put enormous numbers of Blacks and Latinos in prison: how prosecutors pile on charges to get these men to accept guilty pleas in exchange for shorter jail time, not telling them that once they get out, a felony charge will prevent them from getting jobs, form voting (in many states), from food stamps, from public housing, from getting licenses in many professions, from serving on juries, from educational opportunities.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, by Gail Collins (Back Bay Books, 2010). A book about what it for women in the 60s, when stewardesses got fired if they married or aged; when Radcliffe’s male president told students: your education will prepare you to be “splendid wives and mothers”; when doctors who found a breast malignancy asked husbands to sign the permission to operate “because women were too emotionally and irrationally tied to their breasts.” And about ground-breakers who challenged those views.

Let’s Get Real: What People of Color Can’t Say & Whites Won’t Ask About Racism, by Lee Mun Wah. Community therapist and documentary filmmaker ( “The Color of Fear” and “If These Halls Could Talk”) collected a range of responses to questions he asked people of color (eg: “What would you say to whites if you could tell them the truth about racism?”) and questions he asked white people (eg. “What are some of the things you are afraid to say to people of color?”). I’m one of the people he quotes. www.stiryfryseminars.com

It has been a while since I have wanted to let this out. But it took me five extended plane journeys back and forth to USA, before I could put pen to paper.

At this point, I have made my home in several airports on forty eight hour journeys, living sleeping and feeding myself in a manner not unlike Hanks in The Terminal. Long before that, I’d d acquired the practiced ease of a frequent traveler, and if my parents lived in the era of frequent flyer miles, or if Indian Railways decided to honor loyal patrons, I would inherit a fortune of discounts. But this is the story of the woman of color flying abroad.

Warmth and welcome have greeted me on foreign shores, in friends who have loved and cherished me as part of a community that I was not born or naturalized into, in colleagues who have welcomed my difference with respectful interest, and in graduate classes brimming with motivating conversations about racist discrimination. Yet my experience of international travel has remained unsettling territory. It has loomed large almost as a rite of passage that I have to endure every single time I cross the Atlantic. I feel somehow — out of shape.

Of course, I have met countless gregarious airport staff, cheerful crew members, and helpful immigration officials. In fact my very first immigration officer, who looked at me over his scary eyeglasses, gave me a little tip about what not to miss in the Hawkeye-Cyclone football face-offs. I have been rescued from despairing situations by the most proactive security officers, and ushered into closest-to-comfort seats by concerned air hostesses.

Yet, I cannot but revisit today the discolorations under the corners of my glittering eiderdown. Quiet moments of initial shame and later contemplation, nudge me into discomfort. Especially that very first time when I did not know what my ‘first port of entry’ required of me.

Now, as my Mom would regretfully vouch, I am a very quick person. I jump through hoops of possible responses even before I am expected to begin articulating a reply. I run in rapid short steps and am averse to holding up the world for any reason that could conceivably be attributed to me. Nevertheless, I realized that first time I stepped into USA, that the Customs and Border Protection – the CBC – was the eccentric professor of times bygone who expected nothing short of intuitive genius. Well then, perfection thy name was me! I was being my usual efficient self, carefully scrutinizing videos that prepared me to face the formidable customs staff, even while I was queuing to walk up to the Immigration Officer. And I glided through the scary interview effortlessly. I even made my Immigration officer chat about football! I could frog-leap into the blues and do a little self-congratulatory somersault! Life was beautiful. I was fitting in just fine.

But then came the moment of reckoning. I had collected my heavy checked-in bags and was on my way now to reroute them onto my domestic US flight to my final destination. I had been trained on how this ritual had to be performed at the ‘first port of entry’. My heavy bags had been loaded onto a cart.

I was scuttling smoothly with these toward what seemed to me like security channels where they would be rerouted. Two well-dressed officials awaited my arrival . I halted with my cart. With a contorted body gesture I was trying to communicate my need of help to unload the bags for their rerouting. The gentlemen at the security channel looked at my clueless visage and then at each other. With what sounded like a suppressed guffaw, they resumed their disbelieving gaze at me. One of them said, “You’re good.” Figuring that he meant I could leave my checked baggage and move on toward my final flight, I prepared to deposit my heavy bags with what would have been some herculean effort. The man interrupted me with a snigger.

I stopped dead in my tracks. It seemed I had done something — something terrible and irredeemable. I prepared to clarify, first looking back to make sure that I was holding nobody up with my faux-pas. Thankfully, my histrionics did not have an audience. I ventured a stutter, “I thought this was where I check my baggage in again for my final destination….” I swallowed the rest of the words. “We are not the flight people. We are the CBP…” — the haughty grumble rolled into hilarity. What was previously a laugh, now grew into a snort, twisted into a hoot , and erupted as a cackle: “Now THAT’S a first one!” His companion nodded in merry assent.

So I was one in a long line of similarly clueless souls, foreign to the occult codes of airports, passing the limbo into the grand American dream. Bowing my head at what seemed to be a disgraceful beginning to my process of ‘cultural acclimatization,’ I walked away with my cartload of bags. My eyes welled up as I cursed my careless self, “Stupid, STUPID me.”

I write today, exactly two and a half years and fifteen international planes later. Such self-reproach has resounded within me on my several phases of international travel since. Sometimes even for my excessive friendliness such as when I smiled widely to another such security official and asked, “So is this where I go for my security check?” He looked me in the face with a smile not quite resembling my own and chortled, “Yeah baby, this is where you go baby, yeah baby…” Unable to fathom an appropriately outraged response, I hurried on for my flight.

I have revisited this string of words time and again to make sense of it. As I walked past the security channel that day, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a sturdy, serious–looking American gentleman glide past the officer with the grace of a magnificent swan. The officer did little else except to politely nod at him. Once again, my sense of inadequacy drowned my eyes in watery silence.

Of course, a friendly smiling face at a Starbucks counter, and the sumptuous sandwich accompanying it, rescued me from losing myself in oblivion. There is, I guess, something to be said for progressive capitalism that lets you buy your way out of insult with a Frappuccino and injury with a muffin.

Here is a story by Marianna Sommerfeld, a retired social worker who lives in Cambridge, MA. She wrote it when she was 85 years old.

 “They call them pickanninies,” my parents said, in love with a new word and in love with our new country. We had been watching some Black children at play. Newly arrived in New York, we had come from Germany at a time – before World War II – when the two continents had little knowledge of each other. None of us had ever seen a Black person, and it didn’t occur to us that ‘pickannny” could be a word offensive to Black people. We settled in Scarsdale, an all-white suburb, and gave no further thought to Blacks.

I remember only two Black students in college, although Smith, to use the lingo of the time, was considered “good about taking Negroes.” One of the two, who had an outstanding academic record, couldn’t pass a swimming test, which at that time was required; it was said that “they” simply couldn’t learn to swim. Much later I would run into the other Black women, waiting for the ferry to the Vineyard. She recognized me, I didn’t recognize her, and this happened again the next year. She paid me back: ‘Oh, so you’re a social worker now? You’re meeting unmet needs?” “We don’t talk like that any more,” I said. I still cringe when I think about this encounter.

I had always thought of myself as a good white liberal, without racial prejudice. I learned about my own racism in the seventies, when the Boston schools were being desegregated. I was working at a mental health clinic in East Boston; a community group had asked for mental health consultation. With this group I went to meetings with parents, with teachers and principals, and with politicians. Rather smugly I wrote in my diary some of the comments I heard from other good white liberals; “ I am tired of hearing about slavery,” “If they want better schools why don’t they hire better teachers?” I also found myself describing a biracial parents’ meeting thus: ‘Then the Black mothers came in, pushing and shoving each other, and giggling.” A friend pointed out the condescending tone of my descriptions. I might as well have been writing about Little Black Sambo.

It’s easy to be unaware of one’s own condescension. We see this when men condescend to women without knowing what they’re doing. “They should stop complaining now that they have everything they want,” say people unaware of the daily slights, the daily put-downs Black people still encounter – in school, at work, in the marketplace.

As a child, I was taught a little English ditty:

Jimbo Jim was cast away, Upon a desert isle

The ‘habitants they liked his ways, They liked his Irish smile

A desert isle with “habitants”? I’m guessing the islanders were dark-skinned and so didn’t quite count. I don’t know who taught me this song. It seems strange, now, that I was taught it, since I didn’t learn English until I came to this country. But I think of it from time to time. Like many Whites I grew up with habits of mind that are difficult to get rid of. They are part of the baggage we carry.

This is Sarah Miller’s story:

The first time I remember realizing there was a negative value in our society attached to being Black was when I was abut ten years old. My family had recently moved to Baltimore and lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much exclusively White. The neighborhood was divided by Roland Avenue: to the West were wealthy white houses and to the East were less well-off houses. But pretty much everyone was White.

However, Baltimore is a city that, then, was about 75% Black and so the public schools reflected this demographic. My parents had chosen Roland Park because of the public elementary school there. They could choose Roland Park because they are White.

Throughout my elementary and high school years I was always a racial minority. This did not faze me either way and I did not give it much thought. It did not really occur to me why all the Black children arrived at school every day on buses but did not live next door to me. The principal, vice-principal and many of the teachers and administrators were Black and made it clear that they had equally high standards for everyone. I don’t think they drew attention to or from race.

One day, I was standing in a store near my school with my mother. This store, Tuxedos, was run by two kind of cheesy White men (Jewish, I later realized). My mother was talking to the person at the counter who said to her, “I can’t believe you send your children to that school with those children.” My mother responded that she sent her children to that school because it was one of the best in the city, and we left. After that I realized that there was different value and experience attached to my skin and the skin of my friends.

I feel fortunate that I grew up in a home where social justice and equality were stressed. I really don’t think I learned overt or covert messages from my parents about differences in people except that we were all equal. There was no expectation of who we would date. My dating a Black, White, Jewish boy was of no consequence to my parents. What mattered was that they didn’t honk outside our house, that they came in and met my parents, and that their last names were presented to my parents.

I remember my father telling me about a time when he was in the Army in North Caroline and picked up a Black service man who was hitchiking. He said that they stopped to get something to eat and saw that the counter in front of the building said “Whites only” and did not serve Blacks. My father said that he stood next to his companion and said to him, “What would you like? ” and then proceeded to order for them both. I remember being proud of my dad and taking away that it was important for me to stick up for the person who can’t do it for themselves for whatever reason.

I spent my elementary and high school years in close contact with Black kids. I mostly listened to soul and R&B music. However, almost all of my close friends, to whose houses I went, were White and lived in my neighborhood. This changed somewhat in high school. I grew up very comfortable around Black people while being pretty aware of the discrepancies in treatment and accomplishment.

I was not a very good student and so was not in the advanced classes with all my other White friends in 7^th and 8^th grades; I was in the regular program with mostly Black kids. But when I went to high school I was placed in the A program, which was predominantly White, while the B program was predominantly Black. I remember trying to figure out how I got there and wondering if it had to do with being White and from Roland Park. I’m pretty sure it did.

I went to college in Indiana to a small Quaker liberal arts school. Blacks represented the national percentage — about 12% — but that meant that only about 100 of them. I felt so out of place and confused to be in predominantly White environments. I quickly knew almost all the Black students and they are some of my closest friends today but it was a strange bridging experience. Most of my White friends did not share my comfort level and I bridged my communities. I think ultimately it was good for the White students but at times awkward for all.

I began having the feeling then that I have now that I don’t really fit anywhere. I am White and grew up Protestant but that identity group does not really hold for me now. I am very comfortable with Black American culture but clearly I am not Black. My skin grants me automatic membership into a group that I don’t want to claim: White Supremacy. I, like many White folks, find myself in situations with other Whites who say racist remarks because they believe that my skin means I will agree.

The most glaring example of this was when my husband and I lived in Costa Rica for about a year. We met a group of White ex-patriots from the U.S. who were the most foully racist people I had ever encountered. The n-word was a regular part of their vocabulary because it simply meant Back person. They made overt racist jokes that literally made my jaw drop. They quickly realized that they did not have an ally in me and our relationship was strained (it was necessary because they were friends of my husband’s uncle, for whom we were working). We further insulted them with our presence because we were Jewish. There were those comments too.

The other thing that blew my mind about these people was that they were incredibly kind, thoughtful and generous people — as long as the recipient was the “right’ kind of person. This experience complicated my understanding of racist who, until then, I thought could not possibly be kind.

Another situation in which I feel a lack of it is that nine years ago I converted to Judaism. I now strongly identify as Jewish, but I pass in the non-Jewish world and so also hear my share of anti-Semitic comments that are intended for a colluding audience. I have been told that I am not “really” Jewish because I converted and that I do not “look” Jewish. While I know what they mean, why they think this, I am offended and indignant. However, I feel that because I have the luxury of not growing up with the anti-Semitism that my husband took to be normal, I have an obligation to speak out every time I hear it.

It was only in the last five years that I began to realize that these themes that I saw as solely personal were being tackled by Whites and others in a professional and educational capacity. I took a class during my Masters in Social Work program called the Institute for Undoing Racism. It was only five weeks, three hours a week, but it was revolutionary for me. We read about the history and myths about race and racism. We delved into White identity, we delved into ethnicity and how whites threw theirs away to become American. I really began to explore in an explicit and public way my Whiteness, what it affords me and has afforded me, and how I feel about it. I was so incredibly excited by this class and could not get enough of it.

I then did my final research paper for graduate school on the development of White racial identity attitudes: 1) Contact; 2) Disintegration; 3) Reintegration; 4) Pseudo-Independence; and 5) Autonomy. The states cover a naive “color-blind” attitude, an overwhelmed “blame the victim” antagonistic attitude, an attitude in which White racial identity begins to be integrated and understood, and the final stage in which one fully accepts and understands one’s White racial identity. It was fascinating and very challenging to many in our class.

I have to say that while the topic can still make me uncomfortable and re-examine new elements and old elements of White race identity, it feels so good to me to do it, to be doing something with what I have thought about and cared about for so long. I still cannot get enough of it even though at times I am exhausted by the struggle. There was a time that I felt guilty abut being White and having all of my un-earned privilege; now I see it as a gift that God gave me to challenging me to become a better person and so that I can do something good in this world. The privilege of White skin opens all sorts of doors to me, but it also affords me the luxury and privilege to be instrumental in dismantling racism. That is so exciting to me.

Last year I attended the Peaceable Schools Institute at Lesley University for the first time and it too was revolutionary. For there I met other White folks like me! There I met other White folks who talked about White race identity and racism in a clear and articulate way. They were just so inspiring for me. And I realized that there is a place I belong and that there is a sizeable community doing this work. Now I seek out any form such as this to further expand my mind, to grow and meet other allies. I just love this work and know that it is what I have to do in my life.

I do not for one minute mean to imply that I do not or have not had racist thoughts. I do and have. Growing up in America dictates that all people — regardless of their race — we all have racist ideas and thoughts. It is what we are taught and no one is immune. However, I feel that I have actively worked to undo and unlearn these thoughts and ideas and I cherish every opportunity to work on myself more. But I am proud of the fact that I have done a lot of work and embrace the challenge with all of its discomfort.

This story is by  Aimee Sands, a Boston-based documentary filmmaker: her most recent film is ”What Makes Me White”?

When I was growing up in Westchester County, my grandparents used to drive out from New York City in their gold Impala, pick us up, and drive my sister and me back to the city. It was a thrilling ride, as they had electric windows, which we never tired of zooming up and down.

However, when we entered Harlem, my grandfather took charge. The windows slid up and sucked shut. The automatic locks clicked down. The dark people of Harlem were sealed out. We were sealed in.

Sometimes I find myself saying that I didn’t know any black people growing up. But that’s not true. I knew Susie, who cooked for my grandmother. So why do I say I didn’t know any black people? Do I mean I didn’t know any black kids my age?

But that’s not true either. Deborah P., a black girl from Harlem, visited our family for two summers, sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund.

Maybe it’s the word “people.” By “people” I mean the kids I played with in my neighborhood.  “People” were my mother’s friends and my father’s tennis partners. “People” were the bus driver, the custodian, the teachers. “People” were white.

Every black person I knew was a guest in our world, an outsider who left at the end of the day, or at the end of a Fresh Air Fund visit. Weren’t they people to me?

There are other questions I never thought to as. Why was i allowed to call Susie by her first name, but always used “Mrs.” or Mr.” when addressing white grownups? What was Susie’s last name?

What did it do to me to grow up in a segregated white suburb of the North? Not long ago, a black colleague told me he had gone to Radcliffe College, a more prestigious school than the one I had attended. I barely prevented myself from blurting out, “You went to Radcliffe?” That was the day I understood that in spite of my professed beliefs, I had always assumed that I was better than black people.

Nor one every taught me this. On the contrary, my mother and her friends were passionate liberals who worked for fair housing in our town, hardly a popular issue then or now. It wasn’t what was said that taught me to feel superior. It was the way we lived our lives, the unspoken grammar of our segregated reality. It was important to be “nice” to black people. It was important to share “our” lovely town and find schools with “them.” But I was a given that the power to be nice and the power to share — or not — belonged to us.

It was also a given that everything we had was better than anything they had. No one ever suggested that I visit Deborah P’s family in Harlem, that there might be anything for me to learn there.

But there was a great deal for me to learn — and unlearn — after I left the suburbs. As I began meeting people of color, I had to face the fact that I’d never really looked at them before, that sometimes I even mixed them up with each other. I started to talk with black colleagues, who were matter-of-fact about the routine racial slights in their lives. I realized I’d never really listened to people of color before. Deep down, I’d believed that their accounts of racial harassment were exaggerated.

Most of all, though, I’ve had to learn how to talk about race as a shaping force in my own life. Being around white people all the time, I didn’t know that I was having a distinct racial experience, as distinct as that of being black in Roxbury (which , in fact, is a far more diverse community than most suburbs). There was a kind of embarrassed silence about who and what we were as white people that for me still defines the suburbs.

In my new film, “What Makes Me White?” diversity consultant Manuel Fernanedez, who is black, describes a visit to a supermarket in a Boston suburb. A 4-year-old white boy looked at him with great interest, and then announced to his mother, “Mommy, he’s black!” “Ssh!” replied his mother. “Maybe she thought that I’d be in shock to find out I was black” Fernandez says, dryly.

Talking about race I shard for a lot of white people. We feel awkward and tongue-tied. We are afraid of saying the wrong thing. Segregation has made us this way. We did not create the separate and unequal world of the suburbs – the federal government is largely responsible for that. But if we do nothing about it, we and our children will remain as sealed off as I was in my grandfather’s car.

A Cambridge (MA) Writer’s story

Here’s my earliest race story, which is told affectionately in my family, but which I recently came to see differently. When I was in kindergarten or first grade, about 1965, my parents agreed to invite my little classmate Eugenio home for dinner. There were a few boys in the school (this was in suburban Long Island, NY) – Eugenio, Giorgio, and a few others whose names I forget — who lived in some kind of orphanage (although I’m not sure their parents were actually dead) run by nuns. As far as I can remember, they were the only black kids in the school and I realize now that they were probably Puerto Rican or Dominican or other Caribbean-Latino and not exactly what we later called “black” at all, only in comparison with the rest of the school, which was the typical Long Island Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, WASP mix.

Anyway, the story is that the principal, whom I remember as the kindly Mrs. Kass, called me in to tell me how nice it was to invite Eugenio and what a treat it would be for him, and by the way, would it be any problem that his skin was so dark? To which I answered, “Oh no, my Daddy’s skin is much darker than his.” Which was certainly true in the summer.

My parents like this story because it shows them in a good light (that they hadn’t raised a racist; and truthfully, for their generation, my parents are among the least racist people I’ve met, which has a lot to do with their own perceptions of themselves as having been outsiders as well and so identifying with outsiders) but also, a little bit, I think, because, ha ha, of course Daddy isn’t black, what a funny idea.

Only recently, though, have I begun to wonder why I was called in to talk to the principal at all. I had always assumed that it was because we couldn’t ask Eugenio’s parents or the nuns directly (although why not or whether this was true I never thought about again), so Mrs. Kass was the go-between. But if that was all that was going on she didn’t need to ask me about his skin. So I have no idea whether she was trying to protect him from my parents or my parents from him.

More Memories Relating to Race

My brother and I (my sister is more light-skinned) were more than once asked at the town pool whether we were Fresh Air kids. This was up in Westchester in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there actually were a few more blacks living in town than in Long Island and where relations weren’t so bad (of course, you might get a very different story if you asked the black kids about this).

There was interracial dating, for instance, with no obvious consequences. The splits (usually amicable splits) between kids were socioeconomic rather than racial per se (although the socioeconomic disparities definitely had racial roots; with only one or two exceptions, the black kids came from working class families in a town that ran from working class up through millionaire class, but there were white working class families as well, from all ethnic backgrounds).

I remember always being taken aback at being asked if we were Fresh Air kids, not being sure how to react. I knew enough from my parents that if I were black I shouldn’t be ashamed of it, but at the same time my first gut reaction was always that I was insulted. And yet the kids asking usually seemed more curious than aggressive. So why were they asking? And should I say anything other than “no”? And why was I insulted if they maybe didn’t mean to insult me? So was there something wrong with my way of thinking? Or not?

But it never occurred to me to talk about this with anyone. Nationally, this was all following on the assassination of Martin Luther King, the race riots, the beginning of busing, everything, but we lived in another world where this kind of thing all happened on the TV or in the newspaper. We were an apolitical family living in a quiet place.

Later, in junior high, one of my three best friends was a black girl whose father was an IBM executive and whose mother had been a teacher. She was the only black kid I can remember who had executive-level parents, and this definitely caused her a lot of disjointedness with both blacks and whites, although, again, because it was a small school where everyone knew everyone and she was a good student and a friendly kid, this wasn’t apparent unless you knew her well. But still, I don’t remember talking about race–hers personally, mine personally, or in general–it just seemed off limits.

We whites basically pretended the issue didn’t exist, even though you never forgot it was there. I have no idea what the black kids thought about race in that town or their relationships with the white kids. Because of the growth of IBM and Pepsico in the area (which both have decent reputations, relatively speaking, for hiring and retaining black execs), there are now a number of black executive families in the area; it would be interesting to know what it’s like there now.

My Daughters and Race

Growing up in Cambridge and having friends and classmates of various backgrounds since infancy, my daughters have had a completely different experience. They’ve been talking about race one way and another off and on almost since they could talk. At first, I thought this was a mistake–I thought it was not such a good idea for the preschool teachers to talk about Martin Luther King and why he had had to fight for his rights to four year olds. Two of my older daughter’s preschool teachers were black, so I didn’t feel comfortable bringing up my reservations. I saw the kids as innocents who would start to see the world in terms of race before they needed to. Why couldn’t they just enjoy each other before they began to think of differences?

But it turned out that the teachers were absolutely right that this was exactly the right time to start talking about this because they knew exactly how to talk with kids this age, before they had any embarrassment about the issues involved.

One of the most interesting developments for me was that, for a fairly long time, both my kids thought that I’m black. This is a complicated story having to do with each kid’s individual preschool friends and teachers, but, in simple terms, when they became aware of the Martin Luther King story and realized that there were labels attached to skin color and also realized that I have considerably darker skin than they or my husband do, they put me in the “black” category.

From a kid’s perspective, this makes perfect sense: more than one of their teachers who are very proudly African-American have lighter skin and hair than I do. Also, the idea that I was the only “black” one in three generations of the family was no obstacle to this line of thought because they knew families where there were “black” children who had one or more “white” parents and “white” children who had one or more “black” parents. I started to think that some of what they were “misapprehending” actually made more sense than some of my own supposed knowledge.

At first I didn’t know whether to set them “right” or not (because they had biracial friends and they were being taught that there is no such thing as “black” skin and “white” skin and that everybody’s an individual mix and there’s no doubt that with our Sicilian roots there’s African ancestry (Moorish) in there somewhere) and so I dithered.

This was both amusing and confusing for me, bringing up memories of Mrs. Kass and my days at the town pool and not knowing exactly how to handle all the nuances in a way that wouldn’t make my kids think that I wouldn’t want to be black. Amusing, because it revealed how sharp little brains operating without preconceptions follow interesting logical lines, and these lines often caught me flat-footed–there often seemed no good way at particular moments to put them “right” without actually causing damage.

At the same time, I had both guilt and doubt about how I was handling the situation because they were learning about discrimination and I didn’t want them to start getting the idea that I had ever suffered anything like or even approaching anything like what they were learning about–I had a great fear that I might be seen by black parents or teachers as a “pretender” if this story got around without all the nuances of childish and feeling-my-way parental thought attached to it.

So this culturally (if not entirely genetically) wrong “knowledge” about me and my race floated amongst me and my kids for a few years, popping up every so often long after I would think that it had died out. In the long run, I think it turned out to be a good thing: boy, did they take the civil rights discussions to heart because they imagined that under Jim Crow they wouldn’t be able to live with me.

Eventually, I think in kindergarten or first grade, my daughters realized that by modern standards I fall into the white category, but their passion about civil rights remains. I still am often not sure how to talk about race with them because I’m still tied up myself.

But they have learned, directly and by osmosis, so much from their black teachers and from their white teachers who have crafted a “multicultural” curriculum in partnership with their black colleagues, a curriculum that has all the kids teaching each other about their own backgrounds, that we end up talking about the subject a lot, mainly just asking questions rather than finding answers.

It’s still not perfect–it’s still too “black” and “white” and not enough Asian or Latino or everything else–but it’s light years beyond anything I experienced right up until they were in school. And it’s all real to them, not something on the TV or in the newspapers.

Carol Shilakowsky’s story

I grew up in Waltham (MA) in the early 60s to mid 60s: no blacks in school and none that I noticed in town, although there was one man who married an Italian woman and both were dark-skinned, said to be “mulatto,” meaning mixed race.

I came from that Catholic Sicilian ghetto atmosphere, which one would not consider “White Protestant America.” However, we seemed to be fiercely proud that we were “Italian” (although we WERE, in truth, from the mountains of Sicily) and also, proud of being Sicilian — and NOT black or “near-black” as the Northern Italians would say Sicilians were, due to the proximity of Africa to Sicily and to the Moorish history of the island.

I had an Irish father — and did not have the olive complexion and was not associated with the Sicilian surnames of my cousins and friends from Sunday school – and I made it into the “higher echelon of white America.” being placed in a college honor division in the 6th grade, on track for university life with 50 other students, mostly white Protestant, few Italian, none black, but a good number Catholic.

I did not realize any of this at the time. To me — I was living in “white America” and the “poor Negro people” were living in the South, or maybe in New York City where they played jazz, basketball, and smoked dope or were Beatniks. My associations were mainly with Negro movie personalities and musicians, dancers, and vocalists.

I was interested in the Civil Rights movement in the mid 60s, but I was a 25-year-old mother living in rural New Hampshire with 2 young daughters and an older “redneck” husband who had lived in the South. Dirt poor as a child in the 30s, his family had been treated as “white trash” for living among the “nigras” and his was a mixed opinion. He was the only person I knew who had experienced the attitudes of racist America first-hand and seemed friendly to the few Blacks in New Hampshire who had moved to our city and to the Haitian apple pickers who came seasonally.

I was a little nervous around Blacks until I met and befriended a wonderful woman who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Yes, she DID preach – but I listened – and was transformed into a better Christian than my Catholic upbringing had made me. I did not join her fold, but I learned respect for other people in a way I might never have, and learned not to fear people of color. Her religious intolerance was uncompromising, and yet I understood the comfort it was for a “Fresh Air” child of the 50s, from a Black ghetto in New York City, to come to New Hampshire to stay with a family of her faith for the summer, to do God’s work — however they saw it. They were FREE to do so. A lesson to be learned in the villages of Yankee New England.

As time passed, I lived in the South, myself, with my musician second husband. We lived in New Orleans, we lived in Charleston where the black men in 1990 would STILL say “yes’em” and not look directly at me. I learned, then, about the long years of hurt and oppression in the South the race had endured. I listened to the stories of the Gullah people, slaves who had walked from a mutineered African slave ship in broken chains to became “free” to America. I listened to Preservation Jazz. I was there as the wife of a symphony violinist who played for the “class” of cultured America. This husband, the musician, showed me that tux and tails and all – the orchestra was in the PIT and were slaves to the music, to the conductor, and servants to the actors and dancers in musical productions and to the audience — many of whom were affluent and Black.

Class structure, even in the 90s, was still in place in America, and we still seem to use job description and money-making ability across several ethnicities an indicator of status. What you can afford, rather than the color of your skin, still applies as a criterion for discrimination: “poor white trash” — “niggrahs” — “Sicilian” and others can still be seen at the back of the bus, I think, whoever they are. Maybe this year they are Hispanic? Maybe next year they will be those white Protestant Americans who do not have cell phones and DVD players?

My growing up in “white” in America was due to segregation, intolerance, archaic attitudes and inordinate fears, and in some states, legislation concerning race, which fostered the prevailing attitudes. Once many of the legal factors that hindered acceptance disappeared, racial barriers fell. Although probably not perfect, America became visibly more interracial. The American consciousness shifted in the late 1950s to mid 60s: issues concerning African Americans were openly discussed, rights fought for and won, and an entrance into society, once denied, opened. I have a visceral, as well as intellectual, sense of it, being that of a generation where major changes were made in much of the fabric of America.

I happily introduced myself as white, straight, “temporarily able-bodied,” and as an ally to all three of what we called “target groups.” But our in-group language turned some people off. Several refused to label themselves: they wanted to just sit and observe. Our caucus organizers insisted. Those otherwise sympathetic attendees never came to another meeting. Accusations of “nomenclature puritanism” and “oppression competitivness” followed. Mutual respect went down the drain. Ever since, I’ve been leery of jargon.

Now, as I try to understand persistent racial inequality in the U.S., I find myself reading dense books that are full of in-group language. The authors mix words I know in mystifying combinations like “racial touristing,” “aversive racism,” or “the racialized other.” They also create “neologisms” — academic lingo for new words such as  ”positionality,” interiority,” “overprivilege” or “cyberwhitening.” My computer’s spell checker flags each of these as not words — seems that getting a PhD these days requires thinking up new words as well as new ideas.  

Ordinarily, I’d bypass books that use such terminology. And yet, I’ve been hanging in there: racism is too important to turn away from just because those who study it most closely use language that turns me off.

After a year of reading brain-straining books, however, I looked forward to an upcoming conference aimed at grassroots anti-racist people – my type of folks. But even then, confusing codewords cropped up. Take the conference title: “White Privilege,” a term that was once code for KKK attitudes: anti-racists now use it to name advantages for some that should be rights for all.

Some workshop titles with unfamiliar terms like microaggression, code-switching, and nadanolization, intimidated me. But I attended them anyway and did learn a lot. I even came home with a t-shirt that I chose for its bright blue color, tolerating its jargony saying on the back: “Interrogate your hidden assumptions.”

In fact, I’m finding that yes, jargon can be alienating, but it can also be catching. I’m starting to use it myself. I now co-lead an adult education course that talks of “systemic white privilege” as the underlying cause of racial inequality. To make that abstract idea real, we use an image from anti-racist educator Peggy McIntosh, of an invisible knapsack that gives white people, wherever they go, assumed credibility in intelligence, honesty, beauty, and access to people in power.

As I get comfortable with anti-racist terminology, I’m sometimes caught up short. Like the time I was shoveling snow with my neighbor and friend, who knows about my class. As we toss shovels full of snow from street to yard, the conversation turns to race. “I can’t stand it when folks say Black people can’t be racist,” he says. “Black people can’t be racist because they lack institutional power? That’s bunk.”

I am taken aback. He’s African American, and I take his perspective seriously. I’m one of the folks he’s objecting to.

I frankly admit that in my class, I use the definition of racism that’s currently prevalent in anti-racist circles: racism = race prejudice plus power. I try to defend the concept that without the backing of significant institutionalized power to oppress, prejudice is just prejudice, not racism. But he’s not having it, and I realize that I’m arguing for a cutting-edge theory that makes so much sense to those who use it, but which makes no sense to almost everybody else.

I’ve since tried to avoid anti-racist terminology that I’d gotten used to using — trigger words, target groups, code-switching, matrix of domination — but which elicits from most people a “huh?”

Jargon that’s grounded in the day-to-day is still okay by me. Take “gate-keeping,” a phrase that’s widespread in anti-racist circles. Yes, it’s jargon, but at least I can picture a gate, and a person who latches it or unlatches it. The metaphor works for me. It helps me see how people like myself have power to keep gates to closed to people unlike ourselves or to open those gates of opportunity to everyone – in our workplaces, our schools, or our neighborhoods.

I particularly welcome fresh images that give me new perspectives. W.E.B. Dubois’ visionary “double consciousness…. the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others” shows me what it means to be Black in America. Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of the “invisible man” — “because people refuse to see me” — shifts my outlook, as well. And when Beverly Daniel Tatum describes “cultural racism” as an unhealthy fog that we — people of all colors –can’t see but we breathe in daily, I get her point.

So the next time I come up against a catchphrase, for instance “the problem is not Black underprivilege, but white overprivilege,” I’ll ignore my spell checker’s  irritation, and my own. Instead, I’ll look anew at what’s right, what’s wrong, and what we need to change.