This is the story of a journey—not in space or in time, but in understanding. It has been for me a journey both exhilarating and humbling: exhilarating because on this journey I have learned much that before was closed to me; humbling, because on this journey I discovered how blind I had been to a world that I thought I understood.

Kierkegaard observes somewhere—I think it is in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript—that just as it is harder to jump into the air and land exactly on the spot from which you took off, so it is more difficult to become a Christian when you have the misfortune to have been born a Christian. I faced just such a problem with regard to the subject of race in America. Before I began my journey, I thought of myself as a sensitive, knowledgeable, politically committed advocate of racial justice. But as I took the first steps along the way, I began to realize that I understood little or nothing at all about that color line called by W. E. B. Du Bois the problem of the twentieth century. So, rather like the conventional Christian who seeks to become truly a Christian, my task was to undergo a difficult process of reeducation and self-examination, in order to end up where I thought I had begun—as a committed advocate of racial justice. Perhaps I can take comfort from Socrates’ teaching that the first step of the journey toward wisdom is the acknowledgment that one is ignorant.

I did not set out on my journey deliberately, with forethought and planning. It began as a lark, a jeu d'esprit. Only after I was well begun did I even realize what I was doing, and what was happening to me. Twelve years ago, after a long career as a Professor of Philosophy, I was unexpectedly invited to join an Afro-American Studies Department in order to participate in the effort to create a ground-breaking doctoral program. I was bored with Philosophy and very unhappy in my home department, which was a narrow, unfriendly, unenlightened place, so I jumped at the chance for what sounded like an interesting change of pace. I had no inkling that before too many years had gone by, my whole way of seeing the world would change.