the sounds.

words. 

"At fifteen, I went as a scholarship boy to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. The first black student in the school’s history was admitted in my junior year—just months after a blatantly racist story had appeared in our literary journal. For most if not all of us, this would be the first time we’d found ourselves on equal terms with a black person. I didn’t know him. He roomed in another dorm, and we had no classes in common, no clubs or teams. I took little notice of him unless we happened to pass in a hallway or sit near each other in the chapel. At such moments I felt a tingle of unease, not because of any personal animus, or any objection on principle to his presence in the school. On the contrary: in the realm of principle, conscious principle, I had come to profess the equality of all, and the need to change whatever had to be changed to make our equality more than theoretical.

 ... I really did not regard my black classmate as being in any way inferior to me, as having any weaker claim than mine to his place in the school; indeed, I was anxiously aware of the fragility of my own position, gained by deception and under constant threat from lousy grades and an ever-rising mountain of demerits. This boy observed the same dress code as the rest of us: coat and tie on class days, dark suit on Sunday. He was quiet, correct, reserved—neither a star nor a wild man. He stood out, at least to me, for one reason: the blackness of his skin. So it wasn’t a matter of racism as I had come to understand it, as contempt or hatred or fear of another because of his race. I felt none of those things. What I did feel was a frisson of essential, incomprehensible difference.

...most of us still live in enclaves. As much as the country has changed since I was young, this has not. Though more and more we work together, learn together, bear arms together, we mostly go home to separate worlds and bring up our children in separate worlds, either by intention or cultural habit or simply as a consequence of economic and class divisions. And if we ourselves never say a slighting word about those others or smile in a certain way at the dramatic fulfillment of a stereotype, our children, living in our world, will still see and hear such things and be touched by them.

...When my daughter was in kindergarten, she often spoke of her favorite classmate, a girl named Alice. Alice was really nice. Alice liked to sing. Alice helped her clean up after a messy art project. Alice was funny. We finally got to meet Alice and her mother at a school parents’ night. She was black. Our daughter had never mentioned that; of all the many things she’d told us about Alice, this detail had seemed too trivial to mention, if she’d noticed it at all. In my daughter’s regard of Alice, of the qualities that made Alice Alice, the color of her skin had counted for nothing. I cannot say how strongly this affected me. These little girls, unconscious of each other in this one way, revived the vision of a possibility that I hadn’t been aware I’d stopped believing in—a land not of races but of brothers and sisters. That was Martin Luther King’s dream, and it is still a dream. It will never be anything more than a dream until we stop pretending that we have already attained it."

THE NEW YORKER: Heart of Whiteness