Consider that. Today, my 5 year old daughter came home from kindergarten and told us that as they watched the inauguration in the cafeteria, a teacher told them the story of “the lady who wouldn’t get off the bus, so they took her to jail.” 

I grew up in Tennessee and Alabama, and racial slurs were part of the family vernacular. When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I became best friends with Rashaad, a black guy at my junior high school. I spent countless hours with Rashaad and his family. Like a lot of suburban white boys, for a while I believed I was black, or became so as much as my hairstyle, clothes, music, and language would allow. 

I understand now that there was nothing unusual about my white appropriation of black culture, but I’m grateful that my southern eyes were opened through Rashaad. As an English Literature major in college, I poured over African American literature; some of my most formative reading experiences were with Frederick Douglass, James Agee, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Malcolm X, and Toni Morrison. I took their stories as a searing and true lesson of a world I knew not, and was grateful for the education. 

All this came to mind as I watched this morning. I shivered and teared up when President Obama observed that he was taking an oath in a town that, just 6 decades ago, had restaurants that would not give his father service. I have a teensy weensy grasp of the African American experience, but what I have I feel deeply, and because of it, I couldn’t be prouder of my country today.