Crossings

by Walt Harrington

A white man married to a black woman, Walt Harrington has two mixed-race children. A racist joke made in the dentist's office one afternoon provoked first anger, then anguish and fear for his children as Harrington, a Washington Post Magazine staff writer, realized that the butt of the joke was not simply "those people" but his son and daughter. Crossings, which grew out of this incident, is the eye-opening story of Harrington's twenty-five-thousand-mile excursion through black America, a personal journey that is also a documentary look at African Americans today. Harrington travels as a white man in a black world with the intent of crossing over and engaging blacks in a way whites generally do not. He lets people talk - an old sharecropper, a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, an architect, a welfare mother, a corporate mogul, and many others. And he tries to explain what he - as a white man - learned as he listened. He spends time with filmmakers Spike Lee and