I never once asked myself or my friends: Hey, what’s it like to be the only dark face in a sea of blotchy pinks? I knew what it was like to be an outsider. They also aren’t great at putting themselves in other shoes. Kids are terrible at simple math when it comes to measuring time.

So far as I knew, racism was a virulence that was choked out fifty years earlier. They were just friends or acquaintances or enemies like any other kid. I treated the black kids I knew identically to how I treated the white kids I knew. She was more alien than any non-whites in our midst. A handful of Latinos, some Asians, and like four black kids. White was the ninety-plus percent majority of my highschool. But then, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to practice interaction. I didn’t really think of people in terms of their ethnicities or ancestries. It was what we were to evolve toward in our path to moral social perfection. I had grown into a social ideology in which Colour Blindness was the ultimate expression of love one for another. Maybe in pockets in the South where all the backwards people lived. I was so deep into white privilege that I wasn’t aware that racism was still a thing.

I grew up on the beach in South Orange County across the ‘80s. Like trust-busting, flagpole-sitting, and chimney sweeps. I did not grow up caring about the black civil rights movement. Representative John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell have succeeded tremendously in bringing a particular milieu of the middle of the twentieth century to a point of contact with the soul of the reader. For many of us, the best way to understand people who are different from us or other than us is not through dry academic description-much better to feel the life of another person as if you were intimately concerned with their fortunes. Just a couple reviews ago, I talked up the value of graphic novels in drawing out empathy in readers.

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