We've finally adjusted our color

Remember? I do. I was in college then, and when I wore my clunky, dark-green, Larry Bird hi-tops and talked up Bird as the best player on the planet, my black friends heaped me with scorn, most of it good-natured, always carrying an underlying nugget that told a story reflective of the times: "How could you, a black dude, like that white boy?"

This was a line of attack seized on by Spike Lee. In one of his films, a white character living in a black neighborhood wears a Bird jersey and gets a grilling. In another film, when a black character says Bird is the best, Mars Blackmon shouts him down.

Daggers, from a black, pop icon, to white America.

Daggers fueled, we should remember, by the veiled hostility of the day. Here is where politics and the presidency come in.

It should not be forgotten that the Magic and Bird golden years dovetailed with the Reagan administration, which held forth from 1981 to 1989. Reagan, who openly and brazenly courted Southern whites who were still unsettled by the civil rights gains of the 1960s, was hardly a friend to black America.

With Reagan in the White House, we were deeply divided. Racial animus hung over us like a storm cloud. As Banks put it, speaking of that era and specifically of 1984, when Reagan swept to a second term and the first Lakers-Celtics Finals of that decade took place: "Barack Obama just could not have happened back then. . . . We weren't ready."

Thankfully, it's different now. Look at our politics. This very week, we saw Obama become a major party's undisputed leader and presidential nominee. In sports, that other great cultural weather vane, we have an NBA Finals between the Celtics and the Lakers where the old racial animosities simply do not exist.

The Celtics are an almost entirely black team. Few care.

The Lakers are an international squad reflective of our shrinking, flattening world. They are a "black" team no longer. Few care.

Let's not forget that there's still progress to be made. Skin color is still a big factor in our culture, politics and sports. Think of how black NBA players have been cast unfairly as thugs. No one says the same thing about hockey players, who brawl in almost every game. Think about the West Virginia and Pennsylvania primaries, and, lest we become too full of ourselves in the Golden State, remember that race mattered too in California's Democratic primary.

Still, we're in a new, better, more hopeful place.

A black man named Barack is a hairbreadth from the White House. The Lakers and the Celtics are battling for a title and the national narrative involves race only as a look back to a bygone age. These days, black kids, white kids, Latino kids and Asian kids all covet those clunky, Bird-style Celtics shoes for their retro vibe.

There are times when we need to step back, recognize how far we've come, and pat ourselves on the back. We're headed in the right direction.

One of those times is right now.

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Kurt Streeter can be reached at kurt.streeter@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Streeter, go to latimes.com/streeter.