Anne

In retrospect, it would seem obvious that I, as the daughter of two upper middle-class liberals, growing up in an isolated suburban liberal hamlet, would become a racist.

I was not the White Supremacist flavor of racist, but I was a more subtle (and thus more dangerous) varietal of racist. I did not understand my privilege as a white woman, and I did not see and thus could not comprehend what it meant to live without it. I went to my share of Martin Luther King Day parades and was vocal in my support of local desegregation efforts, and I was even president of the local chapter of the Young Democrats.

But to me, racism was the specter of a different era; the era of segregated water fountains and lunch counters. I lived in a gated community and never interacted with people of color. It was not intentional on my part or the part of my parents. They wanted to live in a “safe” part of town, and as the local public schools were not very good, I either went to private school or to “magnet” programs housed in public schools.

I believed that if everyone worked hard enough, they would have access to the same educational and professional opportunities as I did. When I have been reading the recent lawsuit brought by Abigail Fisher, who believed she was denied college admission because she was white, it brought back my own college admission struggles, and the ...