The only Inauguration I have attended, and probably the only one I ever will attend, was Barack Obama’s first, eight years ago. My wife and I were nearly broke, but we gathered money from the life insurance left by my mother, who had died of lung cancer six weeks before the election. We wrapped our California kids, ages five and three, in a million layers of clothing and hats, filled thermoses with soup and hot chocolate, shared hand-warmers among us, and packed as though we were braving the Arctic tundra. The temperature in Washington was in the twenties, and we were outside for eight hours. It must have been uncomfortable. Our kids must have suffered. Their mom and I must have bickered. But I don’t remember it that way. I remember laughing a lot and holding gloved hands. I remember taking turns hoisting our children on our shoulders, and our son waving a flag with Michelle’s and Barack’s faces on it. I remember the Metro car, packed with the bodies of strangers, breaking out into impromptu choruses of “We Shall Overcome.”

We felt hope that day. But that hope was the flip side of the terror, anguish, and frustration we had felt every single day before, living in a country that, for centuries, systematically abused many of its people, and then punished those people for trying to regain their humanity. To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.

For much of my childhood, I lived in a small, mostly white town along Appalachia, in the Rust Belt. By seventh grade, I spent days fighting with kids who called me nigger and nights secretly wishing I was white so that I wouldn’t have to. The message arrived early that blackness was, for some reason, something bad, something that made people hate me, something that made people angry. When I was twelve, a white man drove by in a car and threw a milkshake at me as I rode a skateboard. Blackness, I learned, was so hateful that it made adults assault random children. It was as if I had a disease that made other people want to hurt me.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/obamas-parting-gift-the-power-not-to-fear-white-racism