Another Day in Post-Racial America reflects on the lives and deaths of individuals whose encounters with police officers or vigilantes became part of America’s national conversation about race. What inspired you to bring your personal experiences and essays together in this memoir?

The murder of Trayvon Martin left me emotionally shattered. It was so unjust—a teenager walking to the store to buy a snack, only to be pursued and gunned down upon his return to his father’s gated community, as if he had no right to be there. And the punishment for that was death. Can you imagine your own child walking home and being told by a neighbor that he doesn’t belong? And then that neighbor shoots and kills him? To many white Americans, that might seem unfathomable. To Black Americans, it is an everyday truth they live with.

It is also the truth I have lived with for over fifty years since meeting my husband during our freshman year of college. I had been writing about my experiences of being interracially married in a racist America since 2010, when I first started my blog. Obama’s election had caused an atmospheric change in American politics. As a political junkie, I became a close observer of these shifts and predicted a massive backlash to what the media had prematurely started calling a “post-racial America.”

Then a chance encounter pulled so hard at my heart strings, I consider it a life-defining moment. My husband and I were out having lunch, and I looked over to see Sybrina Fulton, Geneva Reed-Veal, Gwen Carr, Lucy McBath, and Maria Hamilton sharing a table in the very same restaurant. I was entirely overcome by emotion. It is unbearable to lose a child to sickness or an accident—but what depth of despair must you feel when you lose a child simply because of the color of their skin? Yet, throughout the history of this country, Black women have endured that loss over and over.

Seeing these courageous women in person steeled my resolve. They took their unimaginable sorrow and turned it into fierce activism. They did it not for themselves, but for the millions of families they hoped would never have to feel the pain of losing a child viewed through a racist lens—in a country that has failed miserably at reconciling its past racial history and righting the codified systems that benefit some while disadvantaging others. When I got home that day, after having a good cry because I had been too emotional to offer my condolences to those mothers in person, I made a decision. I would finally bring my blog posts and essays together into a cohesive memoir to honor them the only way I knew how.

What have your experiences raising a multiracial family taught you about the challenges of navigating different racial and cultural expectations?

Inside my home, I’ve learned that living in and navigating multicultural/multiracial spaces is easy if you keep an open mind. That’s equally true in the workplace, in schools, and in the larger world. It starts with respect and a willingness to understand that the way you were raised and the cultural lens through which you learned about the world aren’t the only ways. Being open-minded allows you to truly see and accept other perspectives, enhancing your own life and understanding of the world, while introducing you to new possibilities and experiences.

Out in the world, however, it can be incredibly difficult. We routinely ran into judgmental people who made it their business to tell us they thought we shouldn’t be together. We faced socioeconomically impactful decisions that were made based entirely on how a particular person felt about our interracial relationship, like when we tried to buy our first home and the seller thought we’d ruin the neighborhood and refused to sell to us. Those biased decisions hurt us in ways a lot of people don’t think about—housing, jobs, and even our physical safety, particularly my husband’s. Imagine forty men ganging up on your fiancé because they didn’t think a Black man should be with a white woman. That happened to me. They assaulted him because of me. I pushed my little 5’2” body into the fray to try to stop them, endangering myself, too. That’s what we have to negotiate, even now as seniors, like when a carful of young people tried to run us down in a theater parking lot. For Black Americans, the most mundane activities can turn unpleasant and, worse, dangerous.

​How did the changing social and political climate during the Obama and Trump administrations influence the subjects and perspectives you explored in your essays?

As early as the 1980s, I could feel a societal sea change growing. The vital progress made during the 1950s,’60s, and ’70s in terms of race and gender equality, labor rights, and family-oriented workplace benefits—like paid maternity leave—was systematically being dismantled. Nixon had engineered the Southern Strategy and invited the Southern segregationist Democrats into the Republican Party. Reagan tackled unions and workers’ rights when he dissolved the air traffic controllers’ union, while simultaneously mainstreaming racially coded political propaganda through tropes like the “welfare queen.”

By 2008, Obama’s election was secured, and hope for a better America was pervasive. But I knew the pendulum would swing in the other direction, and the backlash would be massive. The rise of Trump was no surprise. His brand of campaigning, and later, his leadership and policies, ushered in a new level of racial division, a rabid gun culture, cruelty, and an “us vs. them” ethos that ensured the backlash got national traction. Seeing someone like Roger Stone, who was on Nixon’s team in the 1970s, show up again in grand fashion on Trump’s campaign team perfectly illustrates the throughline and connectivity of each era. It might have taken them decades to orchestrate this new America, but here we are. However, almost twenty years after Obama’s election, the pendulum is swinging back to finding a more decent America with the results of the 2026 mid-term election being reported.

How do you hope the book contributes to readers’ understanding of empathy, personal responsibility, and the challenges involved in addressing racial inequality?

As Americans, we need to be stewards of everyone in this country. The divisive concept of “enemies within” is a political strategy to win votes; it does nothing to make this country a better place for its citizens. I often use the saying: A rising tide lifts all boats. Every single child in America should feel safe. They should have a decent home to go to, nutritious meals to eat, and a school with adequate resources so they can thrive and learn.

As people, we have to see each other—not as a skin color, not as an ideology, and most certainly, not as vermin, but as human beings. Only then can we effectively address the systemic inequalities still operating in this country, allowing the tides to lift all of our citizens.

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