I was either blessed or cursed, I guess, to grow up in a neighborhood of south Seattle where race wasn’t much of an issue. Granted, 95% of the population was white (though a good share of us were “trailer trash,” I would later find out); but I never recall hearing the use of any kind of racial epithet for anyone—and this was in the freewheeling sixties and seventies, long before the days of political correctness. Everyone just beat each other senseless, regardless of race or class. It was the mastery of the strong over the weak, pure and simple.

If anything, we practiced a perverse kind of reverse discrimination in which we all expected too much of our token minorities, based on racial stereotypes, rather than too little. So Ron Miyatake, for instance, had precious little choice but to be the brainy Asian kid. And the football team was just thrilled when Myron Moss moved into our district, so that we actually had a bona fide Black athlete on the squad. I know for a fact that he felt enormous pressure to be a star performer on an otherwise mediocre team.

So when I learned that Denzel Whitaker, one of the young stars of The Great Debaters, was raised in California some thirty years after I had come along, I was very curious to find out about his experience with racism. It would be encouraging, I thought, to learn that some of our Pacific Northwest warm fuzzies had migrated a bit down the I-5 corridor.

So much for rosy optimism.

“I’ve experienced basic forms of prejudice,” the 17-year-old admits. His first encounter with that in his current neighborhood came some twelve years ago, when his was one of the first African American families to move into a race-restricted development. “The deeds to the houses around us still say, ‘Sell to whites only,’” he says.

During one his first trips to the grocery store with his mom, they were shadowed by a clerk who watched them to make sure they didn’t shoplift. When his mother complained to management, “they ended up having to give us gift cards and roses, because they knew what they were doing was wrong.”

More recently, Whitaker experienced the same kind of thing while taking clothes into a department store fitting room. Right in front of him, the dressing room staffer let white customers go right on in. But with him, “she went through every single article to make sure I had only five pieces, and that there wasn’t anything stuffed in the pockets.”

Still, Whitaker is quick to point out that what he’s encountered is nothing along the lines of Jim Crow lynchings or separate drinking fountains. America has come “a long way,” he elaborates. “Before, you’d have to step off the sidewalk and say ‘Yes, sir!’ to even as little as a five-year-old, a Caucasian five-year-old, walking down the street.”

Still, it pains him to see “the nooses are coming back into play,” such as were reported recently in the news. “So there’s still evidence of racism and hatred. As Americans, we still have a long way to go.”

To that end, he finds the message of The Great Debaters very positive. “You didn’t see these people moping around; they didn’t walk around with chips on their shoulders and say, ‘It’s so racist—so I’m going to be evil toward the world.’”

Whitaker hopes the film will call more attention both to the history of racism in the U.S. and the way out: affirmative action, if you will—seeing what is right, on all sides, and then doing it.