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We also know something about living under the threat of violence. Your circumstances were somewhat different, though: You were 8 when your childhood friend Denise McNair and three others were murdered by some white racist who planted a bomb at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. You described living in Birmingham as living under terrorism, as bombs were exploding in black neighborhoods all over the city for years. Growing up in Cleveland in the 1980s I did not fear white mob violence, but I remember being a child, like you, and having police helicopters shine lights from high above on my frail brown body, their bullets shooting into the night, wondering which of my friends or neighbors those bullets would strike. It is an experience that I, and many poor black people, liken to terrorism as well.

Our families did what they could to get us, you and me, out of our respective predicaments in order to save our lives. You, in Birmingham in the 1960s. Me, in Cleveland in the 1980s.

So I think that we know something about each other. I think we know something about wanting better for our lives than bullets and bombs. I think we know about being the 'first black' fill-in-the-blank. And we definitely both know about being the 'only black' fill-in-the-blank.

So here we stand, the black Republican and the black revolutionary, poised against each other. But as we stare each other down, each of us recognizes something familiar in the other's eyes. For we are two manifestations of what it means to be black, to have to grapple with our existence in America and make choices based on what we know are really fucked-up options. We have both spent a lifetime proving we are smart enough, competent enough, good enough, but we still have no means of self-actualization that is not mitigated by white-dominated institutions that we must negotiate with in order to do what we feel passionate about. All black people in the United States make choices and make more concessions, for we know that the battle for self-realization is never fully on our terms.

But, inevitably, I will again be distracted from my task by someone asking me, 'What do you think about Condoleezza Rice?'

And what I think about you and your chosen occupation is precisely this: Your ascendance to the role of secretary of state
is, for me, simply what it is-a reflection of a racist society that isolates brilliant black people from themselves and forces them
to serve America's imperial interests. What happens next is that the left or the right, depending on which trajectory the black person has chosen, will use that person as an example of how politically or culturally misguided black people are. In my fight to rebel against that fate, I find that I too am trapped by the options. I have to do what I am also good at-which is to work to ensure that no other black children, traumatized by bullets and bombs, feel they have to abandon everything they know and love, and attack another black person's limited options in order to save themselves.

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