Race comes up often in our family now, but it was kindergarten that officially informed Thulani that he is black. Prior to this enlightenment he’d casually told me, on several occasions, that I was silver and he was gold. I liked that.

After a few more sensitivity lessons at school, and yet in kindergarten, he asked me why I had put Rosa Parks off the bus. He noted, and with authority, that it was a white man who had done this to her and that I was white. I am not sure he paid much attention to my “cows have four legs and dogs have four legs but dogs are not cows” explanation.

When a little younger than his kindergarten induction into the world of race-relations, Thulani was draped in a towel and, stepping from the shower, he glanced down at his naked body, closed his eyes and prayed: “Lord Jesus. Make me the same color as my daddy!” Opening his eyes, he glanced at his unchanged skin color and said, “Oh well. Didn’t work. I like brown anyway.”

“Just as well,” I noted, “you are going to be brown for a long time.”

“You know,” said Thulani in the fifth grade, “I am the only black boy in my class? There are girls. But I am the only black boy.”

“You know,” I replied, “I am the only white man in our house.”