by John McWhorter

About the author: John McWhorter teaches linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley.

My childhood was a typical one for a black American in his mid-thirties. I grew up middle class in a quiet, safe neighborhood in Philadelphia [Pennsylvania]. I still miss living at the top of the tidy little cul-de-sac known as Marion Lane, and to this day there are few things more soothing to me than a walk through Carpenter’s Woods across the street.

Ididn’t grow up in a segregated world. My parents didn’t live “just enough for the city,” as the old Stevie Wonder song goes; my mother taught social work at Temple University and my father was a student activities administrator there. My parents were far from wealthy, living...