A British writer with an Asian wife scandalizes the Web with a “talk” to his children about American race, providing them with outlandish statistical reasons to fear and avoid black people.

Such casual racism and paranoia rightly provoke outrage left and right and, in this old white heart, rouse…what? Disgust, sorrow and painful memories.

I was born and spent my first years in America’s largest black ghetto, Harlem, in a store where my immigrant Jewish parents lived in back and sold women’s clothes to people as poor as they were. Skin color did not matter in our lives.

Later, I went to college in that neighborhood, walking ten blocks and back, at times after dark, from subway to campus, without ever being molested, a period interrupted by three years in uniform, ending in Europe, where men of pure white Aryan descent were trying to kill me every day.

Back home, I got my degree, took a job at the college and fell in love with a new graduate working in the same office–intelligent and beautiful, with a face of cinnamon skin and dark eyes that often regarded me above a faintly mocking smile. It finally seeped in that she was somehow interested in me. I asked her out.

“You’ll be the only white person there.” She invited me to a party, watching my eyes. “Fine,” I said.

The party was unremarkable. In the early 1950s, before the Supreme Court desegregation decision, before black anger and white guilt, it was a time of racial tact. Our hosts seemed at ease with me, I was comfortable with them.

We were a close couple until she went on a summer scholarship for graduate study in France. While she was away, I had to face myself. In a dead-end job, did I lack the strength and will for any commitment–in work or love, let alone to live in the world as part of an interracial couple and bring children into it?

When she came back, it was not the same. The heat between us was still there, but the warmth was gone. She talked glowingly about a man she had met in France. I felt I had failed a test, letting myself be only dimly aware it was taking place.

I went to work in Manhattan and became the editor of large magazines, publishing articles on race relations—-integration in the north and south, the first national profile of Martin Luther King, the murder of Andrew Goodman, the son of friends, trying to register black voters in Mississippi.

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