It’s taken us time—years—to understand that this is just how each of us is built, that we are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over time, we have figured out how to express and overcome our irritations and occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s

“I’m not raising babies,” she’d tell us. “I’m raising adults.”

held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.”

relished the swerve.

Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

White families, meanwhile, were moving out of the city in droves, lured by the suburbs—the promise of better schools, more space, and probably more whiteness, too.

It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

if we got too wound up about the grouchiness downstairs. Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.