Crossing the Thinnest Line

1. From Passion to Purpose

As Americans, each of us has some experience that ties us to the complex quilt of cultures, identities, and backgrounds that define our patchwork nation. Most of us are American because an ancestor left somewhere else to move here. Each of those ancestors was once a stranger in a strange land. We come to our American identity in this way—not as inheritors of a shared lineage or culture but as people who forged our own identity from a chaotic, unblended combination of differences. We've all known, or our ancestors have known, what it is to be an outsider. Even the only real nonimmigrants among us, Native Americans, have had to adapt and adjust to fit (or not) this spicy, complex mix of flavors that make us who we are.

This uniquely American identity should mean that as a nation we are better able to embrace the power and possibility that our diversity confers. It should mean that we live and work together better than people anywhere else. It should mean that everyone can relate on a personal, emotional level to the challenges faced by today's minorities. It should uniquely position us to be the most creative, collaborative, peaceful nation on earth. But, as we know, it doesn't. We are instead a nation of perpetual contradictions—one with an appalling, shameful history of institutional discrimination, but also one where anything is possible. One that has been late to ensure the full rights and privileges of all our citizens, but also one where those who were once held back are able to rise to unimaginable heights.

On a macro and micro level, I have been trying to parse these contradictions most of my life. At every turn, I have felt compelled to dive deeply into them and to understand them personally, emotionally, academically, intellectually, and passionately. I guess it's a bit odd. On the surface there isn't much about my privileged white persona that would point to someone relentlessly and obsessively focused on understanding the challenges of diversity. But here I am.

My deepest passions are rooted in my childhood, and my upbringing, family, and early social and educational experiences inform the shape of my life and work.

Washington, DC, was a strange and alluring place to live in the 1970s and '80s—gritty and chaotic, full of contradictions and contrasts. My parents moved there in 1974 from Ithaca, New York, where they had been political science professors. Looking for enriching professional experiences, they came to DC to start a new life—my father at a think tank and my mother at the Justice Department in the civil rights division. After a long search for a home they could afford, in 1975 they settled in a modest but comfortable house in a middle-class, liberal, mostly white neighborhood of DC's Upper Northwest, with a good public school, a community center, and a collection of small shops. Our neighbors were former Peace Corps volunteers, aging hippies, elderly couples whose children had attended the local Catholic school, and more than a few lawyers and public servants.

My mother was a passionate feminist and had established with my father a coequal partnership. He cooked and did dishes and laundry, but so did all the other dads on our block. There was never any question as to whether my mother would work, and I can't remember a single stay-at-home mother among our family friends or neighbors. Our world on McKinley Street was pretty idyllic. Everyone knew each other; we felt safe and at ease in a community of people who were very much like us. It was a bubble of bucolic life in a city in severe decline.

Washington, DC, has a uniquely complex, contradictory, and fascinating history. It was founded as a strongly Southern city completely dependent on the work of African Americans—overwhelmingly slaves—who hewed it from the marshy swamps. But unlike the rest of the South, the District of Columbia was ruled directly by the US Congress, as mandated in the Constitution. So in 1862, when Congress passed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act, the slaves in the District were freed nine months before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery throughout the South. In 1867, the Reconstruction Act gave black men in Washington the right to vote three years before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution did the same for black males throughout the country. Under congressional rule during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the District was largely free of the Jim Crow legal codes that imposed odious racial distinctions elsewhere in the South. For example, schoolteachers in Washington, who were federal employees, were paid the same regardless of race.

Partly as a result of opportunities like this, the District's black population swelled year by year, and by 1900, Washington had the highest percentage of African Americans of any major US city. Black culture also flourished. Howard University, the nation's most illustrious black college, was founded there in 1867. Prominent black leaders like the abolitionist writer and orator Frederick Douglass made their homes in the city, along with hundreds of black business owners, artists, writers, musicians, and social activists.

But the capital city wasn't immune to the racism that infected the entire nation, and in fact it was deeply segregated in social and geographic terms. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, imposed segregation in federal departments for the first time in fifty years, exacerbating tensions between whites and blacks. (As the 2015 controversy over Wilson's legacy at Princeton University suggests, his bigoted act, like so much else in our nation's checkered racial history, continues to spark debate.) In July 1919, during the so-called Red Summer of racial violence around the country, white mobs attacked blacks at random in the streets of Washington. When the police refused to intervene, groups of armed blacks fought back. Fifteen were killed and hundreds injured.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, segregation policies in the federal government began to be lifted. Blacks in Washington, DC, were among the early participants in the nascent civil rights movement, helping to organize economic and political actions like the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaign of the 1930s. In 1939, when the famed contralto Marian Anderson was prevented from singing at Washington's Constitution Hall because she was black, Eleanor Roosevelt helped arrange her appearance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where she performed a concert before an audience of seventy-five thousand people. Twenty-four years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. organized the famous March on Washington, he chose the same steps to deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech.

By 1975, the year I was born, Washington was 70 percent black and suffering from the same urban troubles that many cities across the nation were experiencing. The Washington neighborhoods that had burned in the riots following King's assassination in 1968 had barely recovered. Huge swaths of largely poor, black neighborhoods in the Southeast and Anacostia regions were decimated by poverty, crime, drug use, and the flight of middle-class whites and blacks to the suburbs.

Of course, there was a special irony in the fact that the nation's capital was in such decline. Just blocks from the pristine White House, entire neighborhoods were blighted. Marion Barry, who served as the city's mayor from 1979 to 1991 and again from 1995 to 1999, was controversial even before his infamous 1990 arrest for smoking crack cocaine on camera. By the early 1990s, Washington had the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of the nation.

For many of us who lived in the District during those troubled years, it seemed as if the city was broken. My mother was always on the phone with a city agency, trying to get the garbage collected or some basic service restored. A drive within a few blocks of the city's stately memorials took us past prostitutes and drug dealers openly soliciting on Fourteenth Street.

But while many of Washington's inner-city blacks were poor, living in the grimmest of circumstances, the city was also home to a large, very wealthy African American community living in expensive, elegant enclaves along the Sixteenth Street corridor, as physically and psychologically distant from places like Anacostia as my own home. They sent their children to the same elite private schools and summer camps I attended. They were part of refined Jack and Jill social clubs and were deeply connected and influential in Washington society. These were the black families I knew.

On September 20, 1984, The Cosby Show made its premiere on my ninth birthday. The affluent, professional black family the show portrayed was a novelty to most Americans but not to me—I knew lots of families like theirs.

The black community wasn't the only source of diversity in Washington. Embassies representing nearly every nation on earth are established there, each staffed by citizens who live in and around the District with their families. In my preschool, the children came from every corner of the world; Iran, Turkey, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mexico were all represented. One of my earliest memories is learning to say "Good morning!" in a different language each day. Birthday parties were often exotic affairs. I still remember trying baklava for the first time at the sixth birthday celebration of a Turkish boy in my class.

So while my immediate neighborhood was almost entirely white, the diversity of the larger city permeated every experience. At Lafayette Elementary School, where I spent several blissful years, the principal and all my most cherished, loving teachers were black. In every class, at least a third of the students were black, immigrant, or minority. Of my best friends in early childhood, Alison was white and Roman Catholic; Annie was black and adopted into a white Jewish family, along with three siblings; Alex and Jenny were African American twin children of diplomats who by the sixth grade had already lived in Cameroon and Egypt and would soon be heading to Israel. Racial and ethnic diversity was such a normal, constant part of my life that I barely noticed it. Those early friendships across lines of race and religion became a kind of template for my life. Maybe it's not a coincidence that my husband is Catholic and my children are black.

The Sting of Exclusion… The Joy of Community

In the seventh grade, my parents opted not to send me on to Alice Deal Middle School, the public junior high serving our neighborhood. It was excellent but huge, and they rightly concluded I was not self-motivated enough to succeed there. I was accepted by the prestigious Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the most respected girls' schools in the country. I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of leaving the neighborhood environment where I'd experienced so much happiness, but off I went.

My teachers were brilliant, and I thrived academically, but I struggled socially. Bethesda was less than thirty minutes from our house, but it could have been another country as far as I was concerned. The demographics of the wealthy Maryland suburb at the time could not have been more different from those of our neighborhood in the District. We were a liberal, Jewish, Democratic family, and my mother worked, while most of my classmates were wealthy, conservative, Protestant, Republicans, with mothers who stayed home. I took the bus or was driven to school in a '70s Ford with many, many miles on it, while everyone else pulled up in a shiny new Mercedes or BMW chauffeured by their beautifully dressed and coiffed mothers. I understood immediately that my family and I did not fit in.

I was totally unprepared for the exclusive, rarefied world at Holton-Arms. From day one, I knew I had left the easy acceptance of my Washington, DC, community behind. It all came to a head in the eighth grade on the day of my classmate Jennifer's birthday party, which was held at the Chevy Chase Club. Every girl in the class was invited—except me. I can still hear the barely controlled rage in my mother's voice as she explained why: Jews were not welcome at the club. The Chevy Chase Club, just blocks from our home on the DC/Maryland border, was founded in the 1890s by US senator Francis G. Newlands of Nevada, who helped to develop the town of Chevy Chase, Maryland, with the avowed intention of keeping it both white and Christian. By the time of Jennifer's birthday party in the late eighties, the club's only Jewish member, at least according to my mother, was Henry Kissinger. (Today the club is less impenetrable but still exclusive. I know a number of prominent Jewish Washingtonians who are members, so things have most certainly changed.)

My mother seized the moment as an opportunity to bitterly remind me of the long, painful history of Jews in the United States and elsewhere. My own family, having fled brutal anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, couldn't escape prejudice here. My maternal grandfather legally changed his name from Goldberg to Gilbert because, as a traveling salesman with a Jewish last name, there were many places he couldn't get a hotel room in the 1950s.

For me as a thirteen-year-old, there was something shocking and soul-crushing about this kind of exclusion. It burned: I was angry and hurt, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was a feeling I will never forget. I left Holton after the eighth grade—I was just too different and had made few friends. Fortunately, a spot finally opened up for me at liberal Georgetown Day School, to which my family had applied repeatedly since I was in kindergarten. It changed my life forever.

Georgetown Day School was founded in 1945 as Washington's first racially integrated school at a time of intense segregation, and it retains a commitment to diversity and liberal values to this day. (If I need shorthand to explain to anyone from Washington, DC, the kind of person I am, I say I attended GDS, and they understand immediately.) The culture and values of GDS embodied everything I had learned growing up. It was open, liberal, creative, and welcoming of even the oddest of oddball characters. GDS saw qualities in people that no one else did. We had at least three openly gay teachers at a time when that was certainly not true of most other schools. One of our English teachers had dreadlocks and played in a local reggae band.

By the ninth grade, I'd joined the ranks of the oddballs. My experience at Holton had triggered a major rebellion. I dyed my hair jet-black, streaked it with purple, and took to wearing combat boots and various other outward signs of teen angst. But at GDS there were plenty of other kids experimenting with rebellion and identity, and the school embraced us all.

The teachers and administration of Georgetown Day understood that sorting through the many complex facets of identity was as important to our education as passing AP exams and the SATs, and they had plenty of opportunities to prove their commitment. When I entered GDS in September 1989, race had become a heated and complicated issue at the school. A number of black juniors and seniors contended that cliquey white seniors treated them as second-class citizens. Angry exchanges erupted in the hallways. To their huge credit, the administration seized on the conflict as an opportunity to launch a school-wide discussion. Journalist Juan Williams, who had just published Eyes on the Prize, his extraordinary book about the American civil rights movement, was invited to address the students and facilitate dialogue at daylong assemblies. His wise, soothing presence was a perfect counterpoint to the high emotions we were all experiencing. For nearly a week, we talked about nothing but race. The more I listened to the pain expressed by my minority classmates, the more I felt I understood.

First of all, I loved them. My best friend at GDS, Caroline, was biracial and had been struggling with feeling like an outsider herself. I also worshipped from afar the group of black senior girls who had triggered the discussion. They seemed so powerful and strong. But there was also something familiar about the particular variety of exclusion and marginal status they expressed—after all, I had been excluded, too. By the end of the week, I didn't just understand them—I burned for them, I cried for them, I yearned for them, and I loved them even more. In my heart they were my sisters and brothers. I was never the same again.

Growing up, I never thought my life was especially exceptional or unique, but today I realize how unusual it was. The opportunity to explore issues of race and identity at such a formative time was extraordinary and rare. Not nearly enough people have opportunities like this. Too few of us live or work in environments where this kind of open learning and sharing is even possible. It's a shame, because if more Americans had the chance to contemplate and work through issues of difference in the way I did, we might be a different nation.