Talking about race: Um, you first

A white boy trying to throw her over the banister at school.

A white girl -- someone she'd thought her friend -- standing by, laughing, as Miller ran down the street chasing a truck carrying two of her white tormentors. Miller slapped the girl.

Today, age 47 and settled in Georgia, Miller says she wouldn't be so quick to strike. Her grandfather carried a sharp anger against whites all his life -- an anger that came from years of minding his place, years of "yes suh, yes suh, yes suh," Miller said.

She doesn't want such resentment to cloud her own life, so she has worked deliberately, with the Lord's help, to shake free. She holds two jobs, at JCPenney and a coffee shop, and she serves up the same smile for all customers, black and white.

Still, her memories shadow her, shaping her perceptions.

The other day, a white woman shopping at Penney's commented on a stuffed monkey for sale. Miller heard something in that remark. The woman made "monkey" sound like a racist innuendo. Maybe she didn't mean a thing by it.

But Miller felt certain she did.

'In this day and age?'

Lithonia is anchored by big new houses, upscale shopping and a gleaming, prosperous mega-church so big it has its own gym. It also happens to be nearly 80% African American.

So one of Ora Hammond's white co-workers freely refers to the suburb as "the ghetto." Another of Hammond's colleagues in the operations department at Delta Air Lines complains that affirmative action amounts to racism against whites.

"We've said things to each other that hurt," said Hammond, 49, who is black. "But the bottom line is: They're still my friends."

Hammond says he and his white friends talk about race all the time. The conversations can get dicey. People get mad. But it's worth it, he says, because it brings them all closer.

In her small beauty salon in Franktown, Charlotte Britton, 65, serves white and black customers. But Britton, who is white, wouldn't dream of talking with them about race. Part of that is business: She likes to keep chatter in the salon light -- no politics, no religion.

But the deeper truth is this: She never dreamed that anyone would want to talk about race. Until she saw video clips of Obama's pastor sermonizing about black oppression, Britton said she had no clue that anyone other than a few hard-core white supremacists thought much about skin color.