This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. - Gloria Steinem

As a child, I naturally assumed that the array of books in my room more or less mirrored that of most other kids my age. I figured that in addition to following the undertakings and adventures of Curious George, Madeline, and Sam-I-Am, most of them had read Evan’s Corner, where an urban boy designates one corner of the family’s apartment as his own personal space. I assumed they had read about Thaddeus earning the money to buy a used guitar in Song of the Empty Bottles. I took it as a given that they had empathized as Robert endured his mother serving as caretaker to a younger boy in Stevie, that they had witnessed Mary Jo overcoming her show-and-tell anxiety in What Mary Jo Shared and tending to a new puppy in What Mary Jo Wanted, that they had laughed along with Reggie’s wild adventures in The Magic Lollipop, and that they had followed Gemo as he tried to bum a ride to the Liberian marketplace in Will You Carry Me?

It was only in my adult years that I discovered just how much of an anomaly my childhood bookshelf was.

As it happens, from a certain age forward – I can’t pinpoint exactly when – I committed myself to being on the lookout for any input that could increase my awareness of the dynamics and effects of racism. Anyone could recite a single line from the Dream Speech, or spout expedient clichés about “not seeing color” or “treating everyone equally.” My aim was to acquire sufficient knowledge, enough of a tuned-in mindset, to where I could engage in the subject area in a manner that wouldn’t leave Black communicants feeling misrepresented, usurped, or patronized. I wanted to understand racism, _to the extent that I could – an “extent” that, when it comes to Whites, is clearly the subject of a broad range of opinions.

I gradually compiled an extensive list of examples relayed to me, in direct conversation or through the written word, of the indignity and pain of marginalization – of a sense of “otherness” that denied millions of minorities the feeling of full inclusion in society. Among my musical associates alone, I learned of a friend having been forced to retake his SATs for scoring “suspiciously” high in math, and another who was denied two home loans despite producing all of the demanded collateral. And then, of course, there were the countless testimonies of experiences with DWB (Driving While Black), WWB (Walking While Black), SWB (Shopping While Black), or JFEWB (Just Freakin’ EXISTING While Black), which entailed varied elements of harassment, humiliation, assault, or near-execution by police. I reached the point very quickly, and dismayingly, of no longer being shocked at the reports of threats to life and dignity of a type I stand little or no chance of ever encountering.

Included in the mix was one element that, as you might guess from my opening paragraph, actually did catch me off guard. In a handful of articles or books on institutional racism, African-American commentators my age or older recalled childhoods marked by an absence of children’s literature featuring Black people. Those writers or interviewees pointed out that when they were children, the human characters in the stories available to them were always White – that they had no young protagonists who looked like them, or whose environs and daily lives reminded them of their own. One article noted that in the 1960s, a couple of writers’ decisions that would have struck me as anything but noteworthy – Ezra Jack Keats realizing the young protagonist of his “Peter” books as a Black child, and Charles Schulz introducing the marginal character of Franklin into “Peanuts” – were seen as bordering on revolutionary in their era.

You know those moments when one thought interrupts another and redirects your focal point, whether you’re speaking aloud or just ruminating on a given subject? That’s the context in which I learned something important about my parents.

I was momentarily puzzling over this revelation, thinking, “Wait a minute – they didn’t have books with Black kids in them? What kind of second-rate bookstores were they looking in? I had tons of books with Black charac- with, uh . . .”

That was when it hit me that my plethora of Black-focused books was no accident, no coincidence. I realized that it only came about through a deliberate, pro-active effort on my parents’ part. They were determined to provide their son with a multiracial literary palate, even if it meant crawling through a few tunnels to track down the material.

That’s because, along the lines of my own convictions from a slightly older age onward, my parents weren’t content to relegate an appreciation of diversity and an opposition to racism to the realm of passive undertakings. They weren’t about to settle for the kind of clichéd benchmarks that allow millions of whites to credit themselves with “not having a racist bone in their body” merely by virtue of shunning Klan membership. That wasn’t good enough for them. Rather than raise my sister and me to “not see color,” they were going to make damn sure we did see color – enough of it to feel at home with it.

They wanted me to be able to identify and empathize with the experiences, aspirations, obstacles, setbacks, and triumphs of Evan, Mary Jo, and Gemo just as readily as I would with fictional kids who looked like me. They wanted me to grow comfortable with the cadences of speech, the family dynamics, and the surroundings depicted in the illustrations. I’m sure they wanted me to notice the ways in which the Black children’s lives were similar to mine, but likewise the ways in which they were distinct from mine – and, just as surely, distinct from one another. (Different sets of challenges faced the dirt-poor Thaddeus and the evidently middle-class Mary Jo.)

They sought to nurture that comfort level because they wanted it to flourish in my real-life experiences and interactions as surely as on the page. They wanted me to view people of other races not merely as obligatory “equals,” but as genuine peers – not as incidental “friends,” but as genuine friends, and potentially as companions and relatives. As part of the intimate circle with which I would share my life.

This is where the subject matter calls for a particularly judicious touch, because any reader of African-American heritage could be forgiven if this invocation of my family history sets off warning bells. A disheartening staple of online exchanges – though it predates the internet by at least a few decades – is the citing of one’s cross-racial associations as a sort of credential, and too often as an alibi. From “I grew up in an urban community” to “My first girlfriend was Black” to the infuriatingly ubiquitous “I have Black friends,” these go-to phrases are viewed as self-absolving by those who wield them – and who typically precede or follow them with the most blatant and ignorant White supremacist rhetoric one could imagine. Even absent that odious brand of “I’m not racist, but . . . [insert racist rant],” allusions to one’s interracial history can still create the discomforting sense of a White individual “trying to prove something,” in the ingratiating manner of Mike Doonesbury in the early ’70s, wandering over to start a friendly dialogue with the Black folks in the cafeteria – and being told, in no uncertain terms, that it’s not their job to serve as tools for his liberal education.

All I can offer, as an incantation against those understandable “Uh-oh, here he goes” reactions, is the reassurance that this recounting of my family background is not a prelude to any other subject area, much less to some regressive sociopolitical stance. I was asked to recall a distinctive aspect of my upbringing, and this is what jumped to mind – because it shaped so much of my life’s trajectory.

It also shaped my political sensibilities – although “honed” may be a better term, given that the fervent left-wing activism of my father’s family almost certainly would have steered my leanings in that direction in any case. But with so much of my interaction crossing racial lines, societal racism very soon transformed from an abstract concern to a directly personal one. Any claim that racism was an exaggerated or effete element of American life would translate, for me, into a hugely offensive declaration that the people closest to me were somehow not cognizant of their own experiences – that they were quite literally imagining the intolerable violations of their personhood that so many of them recounted to me.

If any transition stood to alter the aforementioned trajectory, it would have been my family’s move from our home in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mill Valley. I was six at the time. Each branch of my father’s family had made the same move in sequence, lured by the natural beauty of the landscape combined with the convenient access to all the amenities of the city, and by the knowledge that Marin County’s land prices were climbing and would soon be out of our reach. An accompanying effect of that move was a transition from multiracial surroundings to a much more racially uniform community.

In many unknowing commentators’ eyes, that monochromatic element might be suspected – either supportively or disapprovingly – as one of the motivating factors in our move. In my parents’ eyes, it was actually the opposite: They saw the dearth of diversity in our new environs as a regrettable concession, a counter-consideration to the ecological upsides of suburban residency. They worried (I learned in a recent conversation with my mother) about the possible negative ramifications for my sister and me of growing up in “too White” a community.

Although it wasn’t some nightly topic at the dinner table (“So, are there at least a few kids in your class who aren’t White?”), their concerns weren’t totally off base. Looking back on it, I did feel an element missing in my life during those early years away from the city. And when the opportunity arose, I instinctively tried to fill the void.

Around the same time as our move, I landed a small role in an ambitious theater production – an epic, surrealistic dramatization of the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. I had only two scenes as “Daniel” (John Kennedy Jr.), which on alternate nights were filled by a young girl playing a fictionalized version of Caroline.

As the only child among over 50 adult cast members – all but four of them White – I gravitated immediately toward the two actors portraying “Joseph Mann” (Dr. King), and “Samuel Y” (Malcolm X). Without hesitation, the latter of the two assumed a role as my devoted guardian and confidante throughout the 19-month run of the play – and 44 years after our theatrical connection, is still among my family’s intimate circle of friends.

During my 20s, in Berkeley for a songwriters’ open mic, I noticed a man sitting a row or two apart from the rest of the audience – an unfamiliar attendee who also happened to be the only Black individual out of the 40 or so performers and listeners in the venue. Assuming an impromptu ambassadorship for the Songwriters’ Association, I edged over to him, verified that it was, in fact, his first visit to one of the organization’s events, and did what I could to make him feel welcome. That was how I met the eventual godfather to my son.

Our identity as a musical household, with monthly folk-singing gatherings and roughly biannual R&B jams, affected a progressive expansion of our already sizable circle of friends and musical associates, and offered a setting where people of all races and backgrounds very evidently felt welcome. But the best you could say about its diversity was that it was . . . not all White. Some part of me was still yearning for more than that. Privately, maybe even subconsciously, I sought a chance to practice what my parents had preached. I wanted some outlet to actualize the values they had projected when it came to race.

It was the life-altering decisions of my young adulthood, and parallel moves on my younger sister’s part, that would have served as the perfect litmus test for the genuine sincerity of those values – if my folks had ever left any element of doubt. The common heads-up in relation to liberal or even vociferously progressive Whites goes something like, “Yeah, they’ll talk a good game about equality and inclusion . . . but just wait until their kid brings home a date of a different color!” The admonition is, of course, well-founded, as I’m sure many “liberal babies” could confirm after learning that their parents’ racial attitudes weren’t quite as evolved in practice as they were in their lofty rhetoric.

Had that been the case with my parents, it’s safe to say it would have surfaced soon enough. When I was nineteen, I took a position as the accompanist for a Black gospel choir at a Catholic Church. (Yes, Catholic Black Gospel. Seriously.) Above and beyond the oddity of a Jewish kid with no inclination toward religion suddenly playing for a Christian mass every week, the job required a biweekly commute from our Marin County home to Hunters Point, widely recognized as one of San Francisco’s most underserved (and, correspondingly, uninviting) districts. My parents voiced no objection to this intercultural endeavor, which has now endured for 31 years. In all fairness, it helped that the first two pastors during my tenure were both longtime left-wing activists who had shared jail cells with my grandfather following arrests for civil disobedience.

An interesting side note: Numerous acquaintances or visitors to the parish have asked how I managed to develop the stylistic instincts, the “feel,” for gospel music despite the complete lack of church affiliation in my upbringing. (Even our Jewish identity was understood to refer strictly to an ethnic heritage, not a religious orientation.) The conduit for that comfort level was the progressive political music, the genre of “protest songs,” on which I was nurtured. My uncle, Jon Fromer, was the driving force of a large community of Bay Area singers (including myself, from my early teens) who lent musical support to the causes of civil rights, peace and anti-interventionism, and labor rights. Variable ad-hoc assemblages would go and sing for activists at rallies, for striking workers on picket lines, or for schoolchildren at Martin Luther King Day events. And the majority of our songs, from “We Shall Not Be Moved” to “Soon and Very Soon” to “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” were lyrical adaptations of Black church standards. Change “Jesus” to “freedom,” and you suddenly have a non-liturgical song that can unite and galvanize the masses around a worldly purpose. So in that sense, I did grow up on gospel music – but with secular lyrics.

A few years into my employment with the choir, another opportunity arose - to play keyboards for a vocal quintet who had decided to expand from their a capella format to a full Motown revue. Suddenly, my Thursday night schedule involved two rehearsals, in separate inner-city neighborhoods, in which I was the only White participant.

By my mid-twenties, my own R&B band – initially formed out of White associates within the local musical community – began to shift into a multiracial operation, and ultimately into a group whose leader was also its sole White individual. Through word-of-mouth references, I soon occupied the same token status in a handful of other bandleaders’ groups – not infrequently meeting some of my “bandmates” for the first time less than an hour before we had to perform. It was my reality. Nothing about it carried any dynamic of feeling out of place, because I had been raised on the conviction that it could be my place.

That doesn’t mean it was free of unsettling incidents. One night in 1997, my bassist invited me to an upscale club in Oakland to hear another assemblage he had put together. After parking the car and making my way to the lengthy queue outside the entrance, I looked ahead to the front of the line and saw that every male patron, in addition to paying the cover, was being frisked by the (all-Black) security staff before being admitted. Okay, I thought – maybe they’ve had some issues, and they just want their guests not to worry. I eventually reached the front of the line, paid my money . . . and was politely waved in, no questions asked.

It was a challenge for me to enjoy the music that night, as compatible as it was with my tastes. I kept thinking back to the exemption my race had afforded me, and to the strong likelihood that a handful of the Black men who followed me in the line had witnessed it. How would they interpret it? How could they interpret it, other than to conclude it was the venue’s official policy to extend unequivocal trust and accommodation to Whites?

Taking my rumination to corollary levels, I later asked myself whether I would have noticed the disparity myself, if it hadn’t been for the testimonies I had amassed over the years from the people within my circle of family, friends, and bandmates. Of course, that introduced the broader question of whether I would have been comfortable as the lone White guy in an Oakland nightclub to begin with, had it not been for my upbringing.

Alongside these career developments came my generation’s transition into family life. Around 1990, my sister – then a few years out of high school – traveled with a friend to Mexico, and from there to Belize. Midway through her visit, she called home to report the exciting news that she had met the man she was going to marry. Understandably, the hastiness of the declaration threw my parents for somewhat of a loop, and it took a series of long-distance exchanges to ascertain just how serious things were. The question of cultural adjustment, for either or both of the projected spouses, could not help but enter the discussion. Eventually it was determined that she would bring her intended up to California to meet the family. My father brainstormed for some initial gestures to make his prospective son in-law comfortable, and eventually greeted their arrival at the front door wearing a Rastafarian hat with dreadlocks attached.

Once the certainty of the young man’s entry into the family was established, a subsequent task was to secure a reliable paycheck for him, which entailed certain inevitable systemic hurdles. Luckily, my father’s business revolves around youth soccer camps, which gave the family the recourse of taking him on as a coach. Even more luckily, within a few weeks, parents of campers began calling the office to register their kids for additional weeks of camp – provided they could count on being assigned to the group led by this magnetic new coach. Over the roughly 25 years that have followed, he has served as an influential figure in the lives of thousands of youth who have attended his camp sessions, team trainings, and after-school sports classes.

In the late 1990s, the Hunters Point church accumulated a large enough contingent of kids in the 7-12 age range to form a viable youth choir. Alongside the members who had been part of the parish since infancy were several unfamiliar faces whose families had detected a community-building opportunity for their children or grandchildren. Two of these newcomers were chaperoned by a charming woman who I soon learned was nominally “Auntie Gina,” but actually the daughter of the middle-aged neighbor lady who had taken on foster care of the two little ones (and their older brother) after her six children had all reached adulthood. “Gramma Nana” was the caretaker through and through, but Gina was the only local family member with a reliable car, so the transportation to and from the monthly youth choir rehearsals fell to her – which would soon bring about the defining transformational event in my life.

Early on in our relationship, I caught on that, by pure happenstance, her inner-city household fulfilled a similar niche to my own suburban one, serving as the hub for a large and vibrant social circle, and as an oasis of sorts for individuals looking for a sense of family. My parents’ home had such an open-door policy that I once came home to a surprise party for myself and failed to catch on that the full house constituted an “event” to begin with. I just made my rounds through the house, greeting the 30-35 friends who I assumed had all spontaneously stopped by to hang out for the evening – in my eyes, an entirely plausible scenario – before my mother alerted me that it was an actual party to celebrate my recent college graduation.

The same ethos held true in her family; above and beyond Gina and her five siblings, a host of friends looked at her mother as the nurturing figure they sought in their own lives. Furthermore, I quickly caught on that the intimacy of her home community put my own to shame. An unheralded characteristic I’ve come to associate with several regions where social mobility is more limited is that people stay connected with each other, rather than treating their neighbors as incidental (or even inconvenient) parts of the landscape. An intriguing eye-opener for me occurred when we came into tickets to a 49ers’ game. The team was still housed at Candlestick Park, which stood on the outskirts of the Hunters Point neighborhood. As we neared the stadium, we were accosted by the inevitable contingent of ticket scalpers – three of whom my date recognized as childhood friends.

When Gina and I began planning our wedding invites in early 2000, we agreed to limit it to the indispensable names – either family or people who were so close to being “family” that it would be unthinkable not to include them. The pared-down list stood at 340 guests. The Pastor of our church and a Marin-based rabbi performed a seamless, tag-team interfaith ceremony, and we consecrated the Black-Jewish nuptials by jumping over a broom and landing on a glass. Years later, when our son opted to pay his respects to his Jewish heritage by initiating his own bar mitzvah, an Israeli cantor remarked admiringly that it was the first thoroughly integrated rite that she had performed.

Our marriage endowed me with three teenage stepsons, as well as a giant network of in-laws, aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Our immediate family of five took up residence in San Rafael, slightly north of Mill Valley. It would soon expand – first with the arrival of our son in 2003, and again a few years later, when it became apparent that the aforementioned foster children who had been raised by Gramma Nana (and were now approaching their late teens) would benefit from a change of scenery from the often violent environs of the Bayview District. One by one, they segued out to live with us. When asked in one conversation or another how many people were in my house, I typically had to take a mental count before replying. What my wife and I had in common was that to come home to a house with nine or ten people going about their business required no psychological adjustment on her part or mine. It was the norm for us, the family dynamic that had defined both of our lives. Weekends might supplement the residential count with overnight visits from Gina’s mother, grandmother, or sister.

All along, “How will mom and dad take to this?” was the one question I never had to devote even a moment to pondering. This is not to say, of course, that their openness on racial matters transcended all considerations of personal qualities. Who the person was still carried its requisite weight. As surely as my sister’s husband had exhibited an unsurpassed rapport with the very children on whom the family business depended, the new daughter in-law fit the prototype of a superwoman – a community leader who ascended in her career in social-service nonprofits to a CEO position, sits on civic commissions in two counties, runs a food pantry on weekends, sings in the church choir, maintains a rigorous exercise regimen, is currently pursuing a doctoral degree, and is regularly asked why she hasn’t run for Mayor or Governor yet.

But it was in the context of a testimony from my brother in-law where I was reminded that even a qualitative resume of that magnitude wouldn’t have been good enough had my parents operated under a different worldview. Gina and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary with a renewal of our vows, at a ceremony in my parents’ backyard. When the floor was opened for speeches, several people offered customary messages of congratulations, recollections from the first chapter of our marriage, and positive wishes for the future.

Then Gina’s younger brother got up to speak, and said something along these lines: “I need to take a moment – while we’re celebrating the happiness, support, and companionship that these two have given each other – to give a shout-out to Reed’s family. Because at the very beginning, when we were learning that our sister was marrying into a family that seemed to be so far outside the world we’d all come up in, we had questions. Y’know . . . would she be accepted there? Would they feel comfortable in our circle? But right from the start – right when I first started getting the chance to connect with Reed’s parents, with his sister and her family . . . those questions were answered. We never worried about it after that. You come out here, and you feel completely taken in. Just _being here, you feel like family!”

His tribute was a catalyst for me to step outside my own reality for a moment – a concept that we ordinarily associate with freeing oneself from an insulated perspective to discover various faults or misconceptions. But it was the opposite in this instance: I had been so accustomed to my parents’ ethic of inclusivity that the notion of it being a surprise or a relief to a newcomer on the scene came a bit out of left field.

Along the same lines as the books of my childhood, it sunk in that the reality my brother-in-law had extolled was anything but an inevitability or a random happenstance. It reflected a long-term commitment on the part of the couple hosting the event – a commitment to take a progressive objective as seriously in their behavior as in their words, and to instill it in the generations that would follow them.