We lived in a bubble of whiteness. I was born and raised on a farm nine miles from Kankakee. Only white persons attended Limestone Elementary School and Herscher High School.

Emmett Till and I were the same age when he was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955. That is also when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. I remember nothing being mentioned on WKAN radio or reported in the Kankakee Daily Journal.

A few black persons lived in a segregated section of Kankakee but we never went there. In 1960 I watched Manny Jackson, the first black basketball player at the University of Illinois and now owner of the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball, but I never interacted with him or anyone of color there.

Aunt Lilia was easy to love. My first encounter with a person of color was meeting Uncle Jim's lovely Cuban wife in 1956. A beautiful charming Pediatrician, with an enchanting accent and way, Lilia was easy to love. Loving her we became enamored with everything Cuban until Castro ruined Cuba.

President Truman integrated the military in 1948. From then on everyone in all military branches served together. In the Navy from 1963 to 1967 I was focused on learning to do, and doing my job, with whomever was next to me. I saw little notice being made of the protests and civil unrest that led up to recognition of the need to end the still prevalent evil of Jim Crow.

Being in the Navy was educational. Our military is an egalitarian environment wherein dependability, trustworthiness, technical and impersonal competence are what is recognized and rewarded. In the military one works in a civil manner with whomever one is assigned. Integration of the military on-duty was progress but there was little off-duty socialization.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act was important. Discrimination became illegal but acceptance and adherence to civil rights laws is still evolving. Married with an infant in North Carolina in 1976, where segregation was in decline but still easy to observe, it was watching the Television Series "Roots" that finally raised my awareness of the horror of slavery. "Separate but equal" was ugly and alive.

From the comfort of Chapel Hill we watched Black children segregated into underfunded minority-majority public schools as the parents of White children sent them to segregated "Christian Academies". There were a few Black students at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but a lot more at the Historically Black North Carolina Central University at Durham, North Carolina. Most of the Black students I worked with liked it that way.

There is no substitute for friendship. Starting Estrella Mountain Community College in 1992 was hard. We worked 24/7 and I shared an interim office with an elegant Black woman named Pearl. Focused on creating a credible college we shared the same passion for helping underserved young men and women realize their true potential.

It was Pearl's published story about "The Night the night-riders came" that awakened me to the terror of being raised Black when the Klu Klux Klan ruled the Mississippi River Delta. The KKK's goal was to prevent her father, a pastor, from having a telephone. The terror of knowing they could kill him, with impunity for the uppity act of having a telephone, was beyond comprehension until reflected in what is still happening today.

People are starting to fight back. In 1992 riots engulfed Los Angeles in response to acquittal of police officers beating Rodney King after a routine traffic stop. The pent up anger over the injustice inflicted with impunity by police officers resulted in riots that led to deaths, thousands of injuries, thousands of fires and more than a billion dollars in losses. That was when I was first exposed to the danger of "Driving while black".

The death of George Floyd 28 years later in May 2020 drew wider outrage. What was different was nationwide social media distribution of an 18 second video of the incident. People across America saw a White police officer, staring at a camera that was video-taping him, strangle George Floyd to death confident the law would protect him from retribution for what he was doing. This time the police officers involved were sent to prison.

Systemic racism exists. African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are disproportionately affected through every stage of the criminal justice system, despite evidence different racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at roughly the same rates.

Unemployment rates for Africans Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are considerably higher than the national average. The median wealth for white households is ten times greater than for black households, and eight times greater than for Hispanic households. Minority homeownership rates lag behind their white counterparts.

Racism inhibits economic development. It took former slave states, that used Jim Crow laws to impose apartheid, more than one-hundred twenty years to economically approach the prosperity enjoyed by the rest of the United States. Racism is bad for the persons being discriminated against and the people doing the discriminating. Racism is bad for communities, states and the nation.

Apartheid never works. All human beings are of the same big-brained species that is exceedingly good at believing anyone outside their immediate family is dangerous. There is passive and active enforcement of apartheid.

The current Israeli - Hamas war is the latest example of rebellion against active enforcement. Our completely integrated military makes a military backed civil war very unlikely here. Our greatest threat here is from passive enforcement of apartheid.

Each of us is the answer. Personal acceptance of my role in being part of the solution came from friendship with an office mate who was as devoted to helping under-served college students become the best they could be as me. Everyone wants the same things.

Making it possible for everyone to attain their full potential leads to very positive consequences for individuals, communities and the nation.