My mother was a singer, keyboardist and a racist. I believe she got the racist part from her father, who was born in Tennessee and moved to Texas. Her father, Albert, would not speak to, or walk on the same side of the street as, a black person. He hated Jews and Catholics and said so.

Mom, who was brought up in Ohio, where everybody was the same as everybody else. She was an inherently nice lady, but during my early childhood I heard her curse the Jews every Saturday for shutting their businesses on Shabbat. It always came as a surprise to her that the Jews observed the Sabbath every week, just like we did, only on the wrong day; and that this shocking inconvenience needed to be responded to with weekly damns and even goddamns. I heard the word “Jew” sometimes utilized as a verb.

Mom tried to break up my first-grade friendship with a little girl named Elisabeth Brightler, with whom I walked home hand in hand, every day after school.

“She’s Jewish,” Mom said. “They don’t believe in God or Jesus.”

I went to the source. I asked Elizabeth Brightler if she believed in God.

“Yes,” she said.

I asked her if she believed in Jesus.

“Yes,” she said.

I’m sorry, Elizabeth.

When I was a toddler we had a black cleaning lady named Beatrice. My mother was not nice to her. Neither was I. When Beatrice cleaned the floors with our dachshund-shaped tank vacuum cleaner, I would ride on the tank and yell giddy-up horsie at her. She put up with being my horsie until one day she snapped, and yanked the cleaner out from under me. I fell off backwards onto the carpet, hitting my head. I screamed with rage and pain and segue’d into a self-willed tantrum. I sensed that Beatrice hated me, or the likes of me, and maybe I sensed why. That is the reason, more than three-score and ten years afterwards, I remember her name.

I’m sorry, Beatrice.

But people can change. We moved from Yonkers, New York, to “the country,” alias the village of Briarcliff Manor, New York; and my Mom joined the Girl Scouts as a Brownie troop leader. Her co-leaders were two lovely ladies named Marge Malsin and Carol Goldwater, of blessed memory. They were the world’s nicest people, and Mom fell in love with the first real actual Jewish women she had ever known. The three were total besties, and their intense friendship, both with and outside of scouting, helped her and me stop harboring our shadowy racist thoughts.

Thank you, Marge and Carol. I love you. I miss you.

It was in the Brownie troop, ironically, that I missed having my first brown friend. Her name was Goya Perez, she was a Filipina and she was pretty. I stared at her as if she were a museum or zoo exhibit, all the white kids did. I could never get over my unease and embarrassment, because I felt sorry for her for being colored. So when the staring finally stopped, we never buddied up. It was too much of a leap for me.

Sorry Goya.

Sometimes Mom also had a reflexive relapse. She didn’t take kindly to my going out on a few dates with Bobby Kaufmann, the funniest, most talented actor and comedian in my high school. She hid in her boudoir when I brought my only black college girlfriend home to visit. What will the neighbors think, she asked me after the integration of our house was well over. You don’t even like the neighbors, I thought to myself.

Sorry, Bobby, sorry Barbara.

But these were really minor glitches in her career as an increasingly tolerant and caring person. She cultivated all sorts of people through scouting and library work. And then there was the Cantata she helped create with her friend Jane White.

The cantata was for youth choir, and was called “My Garden,” based on a collection of poems about how we love flowers of all colors, and other texts about tolerance and love. This was the first cantata had ever sung in, and I was both a chorister and a soloist. I was about twelve I think. I only remember bits of it, my solos of course: “Are you a gentile, are you a Jew? What’s your belief, your point of view” and the final line, “I look into my garden. There’s much to understand.”

Thanks, Jane and Mom for this sweet little piece.

We tried hard, we thought, to listen to our better angels, and the flower music that ran through our minds’ ears. Mom and I became nicer people, in our way. We had Jewish friends, Black friends.

Mom and I both grew up in a wall-to-wall racist environment. We were swaddled in it, nurtured by it we swam in it as fish do in water, in our benign element, but unconscious that it was supporting us.

When we are very young we feel that the world was created for our benefit and comfort. For white people of all ages, America and its system of pale-person privilege keeps us in that infantile state. We were insulated from the real world by an inherited legacy of wealth and property, which we could pass on to our own kids. We lived in places that were safe and tranquil, where everybody knew the cops by name, and nobody worried about being arrested and going to jail. We could walk into stores and public places and never think we might get thrown out. We went to good public schools and never doubted that we would go on to college. Of course, we were happily, or willfully, unaware of the violence and injustice that the Other People suffered, in Other Towns not very far from where we lived, and across the country.

We prospered as a matter of course, and we prospered at the expense of the Other People. Even when we were warbling our little be-nice hearts-and-flowers cantata, we never thought that we were responsible for the differences between us and Them. But we were, and we are. It’s on us. To fix it.

Sorry, America.

God Bless the America that grew inside my mother’s heart, and mine. God bless the time when, as the man said, “America will be.”