Just after four o’clock in the morning few cars have ventured out onto San Diego’s Streets and Highways.  Only street lights and very few automobiles' low beams cut through the darkness... the car light breaks are temporary, contained and always quickly leave the world the way it is when night rules the suburbs… little color except roadway reflectors and lots of shadows. I drove out to El Cajon to pick up my friend Ed at his house. Darkness blanketed Windmill View Road in the early morning long before the approaching sun brightened the sky.

I have been preoccupied lately with an awareness that my existence is known really only by me.  Margaret knows me pretty well.  My close friends and my children have some mostly fixed notions of who I really am. My drivers license and my passport don’t give a clear definition of who I am. 

I wrote yesterday of my learning first what being black by living as a black person in America means to Ta-Nehisi Coates and what he says it must mean to his son; and since yesterday I have been trying to figure out what being white means. Sitting in the dim interior of my moving car at four-thirty in the morning, I tried to picture myself as a person of color, as dark as the darkness of the space in which I sat and drove. I wondered what it might be like to step into a well lighted room as a person with skin as dark as midnight. Most of us white people have no way of knowing what it is to be "the other."

My grandparents had nine sons, no daughters... My father is the guy in the red shirt.  The picture was taken sometime around 1943 or 1944.  Uncle Ed was still in the army.  My grandfather lived another twenty years, to age ninety-six.  We are a white family.  None of us ever knew what it feels like to go out into the world afraid because of tint of our skin.