The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn’t always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn’t yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

Dunham reflects on how perspective changes with age: influences that once felt invisible—family values, expectations, and protective decisions—become clearer over time. The second half turns from private memory to social critique. She describes a community that imagined itself “beyond” racism, yet still enacted it in everyday ways, exposing the gap between self-image and practice. By crediting her parents with securing an education in such a place, she suggests both the necessity of strategic navigation for Black families and the psychological complexity of growing up amid denial: prejudice can be most insidious when it is unacknowledged, intermittent, and normalized as “occasional.”