I, Racist: Confessions of a White Liberal

Before white liberals can truly join the fight against racial discrimination, we have to take a hard look in the mirror

Gordon from Sesame Street was the only black person whose name I knew as a child. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images

Just say it out loud, just to see how it feels. — Kanye West

The first time I met a black person was in 1983. I was in third grade. I was raised in mid-coast Maine on an ersatz hippie commune that had, by that point, largely fizzled. Instead it became an overlarge and endlessly almost-finished single-family house at the top of a hill on a sparsely populated country road in the town of Appleton. I must have been aware that there were people who weren’t white — in fact I knew about Gordon from Sesame Street — but there were none in my everyday life. There were no people of color at the grocery store or at little league. There were none in restaurants or in town.

There were no people of color in my life whatsoever until one day, when a black boy showed up in my class. Apparently, his family had recently moved to town. But within a month, he and his family were gone.

My parents are good-hearted white people and they raised me to treat everyone with respect, but the stakes were minor. Our town only had one side of town: the white side. And maybe this was why, when I first used the N-word — in fact, the…