You write, "For black middle-class and upper-middle-class parents, schooling means segregation of a different sort -- children who almost never encounter another black child, who are always 'the' integration wherever they go."

For most of my son's academic career, he has been the only black kid in his class, though not in his school. For most of my black friends it's the same thing: Living in an integrated world means you're really living in a mostly white world, and you are the integration. As children take it in, it's sort of funny sometimes. For example, my son went to a birthday party once. This little kid invited lots of other kids from around his neighborhood, beyond the classmates who knew my son. So when we came in the door, I heard the kid saying about my son, "This is my friend; he's black!" He was just so excited.

In the book, I mentioned the conceptual artist damali ayo, who has this Web site called Rent-a-Negro.com. She has a book coming out about people who want to have a black person to impress their friends and to prove they're not racist. This little kid, of course, was not a racist, but it was clear that being the only black person means you are a perpetual novelty. And children don't censor their sense of that novelty. They tend to connect you to the only other black people they know.

For a long time that was Michael Jordan, but now that Michael Jordan has faded as a role model (unfortunately), he has been replaced by any variety of singers and rap stars. It's interesting because now that my son is just on the cusp of adolescence -- he's 12 -- you see all the kids, black and white, imitating these sportslike gestures. They expect my naive little boy to teach them "the secret handshake," and my son is making them up to be "race cool," so to speak. It's amusing, but it's also a little worrisome.

In the book, you say your son "knew about Martin Luther King Jr. and had read books about the necessity for black self-esteem and education and economic power and how beautiful we all were." And yet, he still asked if his light-skinned black grandmother was "white" because she was lighter than an Italian neighbor. Now that he's getting older, has there been a defining moment where he has been, like, "Mom, I get the 'black' thing now"?

Yes. It was when the father of one of his friends talked about "these black kids who are criminals." This man started talking about "black boys" like he had forgotten my son was there. He had categorized him differently, or exceptionalized him separately. But my son got it. He was 8 years old.

That moment comes for all of us. For me it was when one of my friends' fathers in Boston decided that when blacks moved into his neighborhood, he was going to move out. So for me, it was hearing what he thought through this little girl, my friend. It's often peers or parents of those peers who bring this realization.

There's a chapter in the book called "The Boudoir," where you briefly discuss dating with your "best white friend," but otherwise men, romance and sex are conspicuously absent from your book. Why?

[Loud sigh] I think my relationships were all good ones, and I'm sorry that some of them didn't work out. I used to be sorrier, but as I approach middle age, a large percentage of my friends are engaged in child custody battles or divorce, and my sister is a widow. I think that as you grow older, you take what life gives you, and I don't regret it as much as when I was younger, in my aspirational prime.

Can you tell me how you came to the decision to adopt your son? That, too, is absent from the book. You say you were working on adoption case law, but not much else.

My last major relationship had broken off, and I was 40, and I wanted a child. I am a very lucky person and I've had a very lucky life; I have a lot of resources at my disposal. I literally went down to an adoption agency on my 40th birthday. It was really odd, actually, because the adoption agency presented all the racial combinations that they had at the time: everything from Sino-Japanese to Afro-Celtic to Senegalese. It was like going to Kentucky Fried Chicken. The array of options felt almost as vulgar as choosing a leg or a wing. I really didn't care about any of this, gender or race. My son is black.

Toward the beginning of the book, you bring up a question asked by Anna Deavere Smith: "Who is the one person you could never be?" You say the whole book began as an effort to answer that question. Have you come to an answer yet?

I did a column for the Nation recently in which I was thinking about the complicated icon that Condoleezza Rice is. Now, I don't know Rice as a person -- she has been very effective at keeping her life private. But the myth of Condoleezza Rice's life is so akin to what so many of us at a certain age survived, lived, how we constructed ourselves, how we wanted to appear to the public, how we watched the borders of who we were. We were the same kind of achievers. When I hear about the lessons she went to, I think of all the Saturday lessons I went to --swimming, piano. We had to be really well scrubbed. The message you got from your parents was that you might be the first black person a white person had ever seen; you had this whole burden of race on your shoulders. She evokes that feeling in me more than any other public figure.

At the same time, here's someone who clearly represents the ideological opposite end of everything I believe in and stand for. So I think when the question "Who could I never be" gets asked, I'm confronted with the enormous paradox of being human. There is nobody I could say I'd never be. Once I've even asked the question, I am mired in a sense of identification. Because I think of someone who is so different from me, but then I think, "Oh really?" I am already engaged in this person.

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