I was a naive girl. I grew up on military bases from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Fort Dix, New Jersey, which may have been some of the most racially egalitarian places in the country. Military bases often are. My neighborhood was diverse, but at the time I didn’t recognize that. Kids were kids. We all played together, went to each others birthday parties, snuck kisses behind trees, never paying attention to the color of each others skin.

Our neighborhoods were divided by military rank, so our dads were all Green Berets, or Drill Sergeants, or Rangers. We didn’t care much about that either.

I remember first learning about the United States’ history of intolerance in school: slavery, civil rights and racism. I thought how terrible things were back then. I believed that I lived in a time when people were equal. That racism was a thing of the past…