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13 2 Lemonade! For years, I’ve had a lot of people telling me I need to do a book. My friends and family tell me I need to do it, because of what I’ve done and the things I’ve seen. That’s been cause for a lot of thought, and I want to start this with something that might shock you, something I’ll come back to as we go through this thing. Segregation served me well. And I think there is something there, a kind of secret, that people need to understand. I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, a cradle of segregation, right across the river from our nation’s capital. During my time, during all my school years, the most respected people in the neighborhood were the teachers. None of us got in trouble. You couldn’t afford to get in trouble. The folks we respected the most were the teachers. We saw them every day, and they saw our parents around the neighborhood, and we knew they’d be telling our parents what we were doing. But we didn’t just listen to them out of fear. We listened to them because we wanted to please them, because we knew they wanted the best for us. For years, we were handed lemons. Because of teachers who truly cared, it became lemonade. Do you understand? This is why segregation served us well. Our teachers were all black, and there was a benefit to that. Now, I’m not saying white teachers can’t teach black kids, but this was a love affair. These were all-black schools, and these teachers knew any chance we had out in the world was incumbent on what they gave us in the classroom. And they were receptive to that challenge. They lived the same things we lived. They had been stopped by the same things stopping us. Every teacher who taught me was serious. They wanted one thing, and that was for us to find a way out, and there was 14 | Moonfixer only one way to do it: knowledge. Basketball was my path, but basketball would not have been there for me if not for my teachers. To me, today, one of the biggest problems we have in our schools is that teachers don’t get that kind of reverence and respect. Our parents taught us that anyone in authority deserved respect—and by authority, I mean adult black authority, because you did everything you could to stay away from white authority. Our teachers knew exactly what would give us a chance. They provided it every day, and they knew our parents wanted us to have it, too. I’m old school, a believer that we’re all products of our environment. The people who sit across from you at the dinner table on a daily basis, especially when you’re a child, have a tremendous effect on you for the rest of your life. That’s why I know how hard it is for some people to change the way they think. So many folks grow up hearing things—hateful things— from their parents at that table, and then they take all that out into the world. Be honest. If you love your mother and father, it is a hard thing to give up the things your parents felt and believed. So there are times, even now, when I will be sitting with someone and they will be saying one thing about the way they see the world, and I can feel something else is going on deep inside them. They’ll say that’s not the way they are, that they don’t carry any bias against anyone, but they’ll look hard for any example that will justify the way they really feel. I know what their parents taught them is still living in there, and that is still the hardest thing for any human being to change. Not that any of it is an excuse for putting someone else on the wrong end of that anger. Looking back on it, you’ve got to wonder: how could they hate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Wasn’t he saying all the right things about what it meant to be Christian? Didn’t he live out the idea of peace? All he talked about was loving your enemies and praying for your enemies . Isn’t that what Christianity means? How much do you have to hear...

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