Bridging the racial divide is everyone’s responsibility, says a mother who practices what she preaches 

One day when my sons, Jesse and Peter, were four and five years old, I looked around at our safe, middle-class, all-white California suburb-at the picture-perfect, mostly white neighborhood elementary school, at my sons’ white friends-and I decided to write a new page in our family history.

I didn’t want my sons to grow up in the same state of isolation and ignorance that I did. I didn’t want to plant in my own children the seeds of bigotry and fear. And I didn’t want to leave this world the way I’d found it by raising another generation in segregation. So in 1984 I moved to a mostly black, working-class neighborhood in Oakland, California, and enrolled my sons in mostly black public schools.

Thirteen years later, our house is often filled with teenage boys. Jesse’s friends are all African American and all athletes; they’ve got Nike swooshes carved into their haircuts and basketballs in their book bags. Peter’s friends are Chilean and Mexican and African American; they wear dreadlocks and Bob Marley T-shirts. On Sunday mornings, these boys rummage through our fridge-looking for milk to pour on their Captain Crunch or soy-milk for their granola-and my heart swells with joy. This is just what I had in mind.

But sometimes in the midst of these warm moments, I’m chilled by sobering thoughts: In California, nearly 40 percent of African American males in their twenties are either in jail, or on parole, or on probation. And nationwide, homicide claims the lives of 46 percent of black males between the ages of 5 and 19.

I look around my house at these young men whom I’ve loved since they were 5 or 10 or 15 years old, these boys who live in my heart, and I wonder: Which four out of ten won’t make it?

I know that it benefits no one for a white parent like me to care about the fate of black males in an abstract, patronizing fashion. But what moves me to go to school board meetings and argue for smaller, more relevant classes, more counselors, better school lunches; what moves me to stop and make my presence know when I see police confronting African American boys; what moves me to work to put the local crack dealer out of business is that I have invested my own children in the outcome.

Because my sons are white, they have only been grazed, not wounded, by stray bullets of racism that are aimed at their friends. But Jesse and Peter have grown up surrounded by people of color. And so they’re motivated as I am, by love and by self-interest-a powerful combination-to raise the level of the river beneath the boat we’re all in together.

Whenever and however caring parents live, there’s plenty we can do to combat segregation and prejudice. We can teach tolerance at the dinner table and at bedtime. We can campaign for multicultural school boards, faculty, and curriculum. We can urge our PTAs to cosponsor events with inner-city PTAs and take our kids to racially mixed after-school programs and religious services.

By recognizing these possibilities, we’re also acknowledging the responsibility we share to bridge the racial gulf that divides our country. No doubt our children are smart enough, resilient enough, and openhearted enough to meet the challenge. The question is, are we?