Our house sits on a residential street that the road map of our small town, population 13,663, which is about 28 miles from Pittsburgh, designates a major arterial. Traffic rushes by. Ambulances back into nearby garages. Life Flight helicopters whir overhead.

Our neighbors one house over, a young Black family, recently rented their home to a wonderful neighbor and moved away. I imagine they now live in an attractive suburban home, near the schools they want their children to attend. I’m happy for them.

And I think a lot about moving to the suburbs.

But all around our neighborhood, people…

This summer, dealing with Covid, my husband and I have been spending more time at home, but I’ve tried to take a long walk every day. Walking isn’t a big activity in our small town, 28 miles from Pittsburgh, and anyone walking around town regularly gets noticed. We live in a historically Black neighborhood with a big AME church and families who have lived here for generations.

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking down a neighborhood street and restarting my cell phone, when a young Black man tensely asked me, “what are you doing?” I looked up at…

We met in afternoon daycare at four years old in 1975 at a primary school on James Street in Kent, Washington, and we entered morning kindergarten the next year. Cho Cho was my first school friend, and I still have pictures of Cho Cho, whose mom was Burmese (Myanmar) and whose dad was of African ancestry; I don’t know if his family were immigrants or descendants of slavery. To me, a white four-year-old, Cho Cho simply looked Black.

In one picture, we’re playing in the park, our moms watching us from a bench. In another, we’re sitting together at a…

It was uncomfortable

Whenever I remember that phone conversation, I can feel my face heat up.

I write for a magazine that covers Christian and Jewish seminaries, which essentially operate just like any other graduate school. I also consult for an Anglican seminary, and in May 2020, our Board of Trustees announced that one of the trustees had endowed a Scholarship for African American Students.

Now, our Anglican seminary enrollment includes many students from Kenya and Uganda, mostly from the Kikuyu tribe, who converted to Christianity, due to economic necessity, at the end of the nineteenth century, when they were…

Where empathy begins

I’m not an intimidating person. Few people in their senses would fear me. But when, as coronavirus quarantines began, I began taking daily walks through our rust belt town, situated about 28 miles from Pittsburgh, this past year, I gradually became painfully aware that my face, passed down to me by people arriving in America from northern, southern, and eastern Europe in the early 1900s, caused unease for people in our neighborhood. …

My dad first introduced me to Mahalia Jackson years ago, and when I listened, she captivated and consoled all at once. Her long trills fitted neatly into the grooves in the air, as if she had her own key to them. And in the caverns created by her deep, lilting voice, I heard the faith and resilience of a Black American woman who had lived through the trauma of the Jim Crow south to tell about how “the grace of God” had gotten her “thus far.”

So last week, when my friend, whom I’ll call William, a Black man in…