Let me tell you a story about racism.

I grew up in the very white northeast corner of Davidson County, North Carolina, maybe 15 miles south of Winston-Salem. The community was matter-of-factly sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Baptist, and especially racist, as things were in the working-class South of the ’60s and ’70s.

My grandfather (my grandparents raised me) switched to the Republican Party as part of the Civil Rights Act backlash. He voted for Jesse Helms. He voted for Wilmer Mizell. He would have voted for George Wallace if he hadn’t gotten shot.

Whenever a black appeared in a TV show, he’d rant about how “they got to be everywhere now.” And in the same way that “dog” was the word for the furry, four-legged animals he used to hunt with, “[N]” was the word for people of African descent.

In my first-grade class there was precisely one minority, a black girl named Juatina who sat right behind me. Each morning at break we’d all get chocolate milk and whatever snack our parents (in my case, grandparents) had packed for us. I always brought Fig Newtons, which I love to this day.

One morning I noticed Juatina didn’t have anything. No milk, no cookies, nothing. I’d never talked to her because she was, you know, but I felt…awkward?

So I gave her a couple of my Fig Newtons.

When I got home, I told Grandmother and Granddaddy.

The rest of the year they packed twice as many cookies so I could share, and they also sent extra money so she could have chocolate milk.

I’m determined to be as good and more determined to be better.