My sister and her family recently moved from the Southwest
to the Washington, DC area. She
has three young kids.
At Dulles airport, my three-year old niece looked around at
the assemblage of tourists and businesspeople, and saw a black man wearing a
suit.
“Look, Mommy!” she said, pointing at the man. “It’s the President!”
I have told this story to a few people. Some are not quite sure what to make of
it. Like me, most of my white friends are liberal Democrats, and we
well-intended liberals have a history of being anxious around any kind of
racial typing.
On the other hand, my Mexican-American cousins love this
story. It resonates. They laugh heartily. And so do all the black people I’ve
told it to. My Haitian cab driver
in Atlanta thought it was great.
Here in New York, an African-American female lawyer I know
clapped her hands in delight.
“That’s a great story,” she said. “She sees a president, not someone she’s supposed to run
across the street to avoid.”
This is what world-altering change is: seeing the world in a
fresh way. We still have filters,
but they’re better than the filters we had before.
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