The late afternoon sun was shining the day I arrived back in Boston.  The Charles River was anything but still with dozens of rowers gliding across its surface.  Basking in the good weather, people were out in droves.

Harvard Square was teeming with students donning running shorts or traipsing over the brick sidewalks, iced coffee in hand.  I typically love such days, but the whole scene seemed a bit bizarre.

I turned to my mom and said, unthinkingly, “Wow, Cambridge is so white.”  

In talking to my Senegalese family and friends, I had always taken a great deal of pride in relating that America is not defined by any one culture, skin color, language, or religion.  I tried to translate “melting pot” into French.  And even Wolof (I only got so far as “pot”). However, as we crawled through Harvard Square, not a single black person was to be found. Never before had skin color been so very important.  Or, perhaps it was the absence of color.

Last weekend, I wound up in New York City to visit friends, family, and interview for a job at a non-profit.  The non-profit’s offices were located on Wall Street.

I rode the six train downtown. An African American woman raised her voice over the subway’s roar; she announced that she was a published poet and a direct descendent of the Great Malcolm X.  She had some small booklets for sale.  Struggling to maintain her balance, she teetered up and down the car offering the booklets to anyone who extended a hand or didn’t avert their eyes.

I looked at her curiously and she pressed two booklets into my hand: Affirmations for the African American Child and A Brief History of Malcolm X.  

I flipped through the booklets, especially intrigued by the Affirmations for the African American child.  Afraid that I would have to step off the train before returning the booklets to their author, I glanced about the car.

I realized that I was one of two white passengers.  A grizzled old man being the other.  The car was not particularly full, but it contained an impressive range of ethnicities.  Elated by this discovery, I then spent the rest of the train ride employing the language of my ultra politically correct upbringing to convince myself that I was being ridiculous.  Why polarize, generalize, draw lines where they don’t exist, etc. etc?  

The train reached my stop and I emerged from the city’s damp depths to a blustery wind tunnel of skyscrapers.  I hurried past marbled lobbies with cathedral ceilings to the end of the block and stopped short, affixed to the sidewalk by a small panic attack.   Investment bankers clipped my shoulders, their trench coats billowing behind pressed suits. The hustle and bustle hardly disturbed me.  It was the massive buildings whose facades formed an inexorable gauntlet.  And it was the air, heavy not with rain, but money.    Money.  Money.  Money.  Time is money, I reminded myself as the foot soldiers of money swept by, indistinct.  

I stumbled into an Au Bon Pain and perched on a spindly chair facing a narrow counter along a wall of glass.  I briefly considered those I knew in the city and who could come downtown to coax me from my seat.  But, though I love to dwell in the domain of the worst-case scenario, I decided that a little personal pep talk was all that was needed.

While in Senegal, I had come to better understand how the US’s influence is truly ubiquitous and well, for lack of a better word, pernicious.  In politics, business, and culture, our lives are on display.  Those whose eyes registered money signs when they learned my nationality were not entirely mistaken in their beliefs.  

How fortunate I am to have been born in a country where such resources exist, where such wealth is possible. This country, reveling in its power, is certainly not without its flaws.  But I carry a US passport and an education, the only tools one supposedly needs to fully engage in our democracy, or capitalism, for that matter.  So why try to escape these truths, these privileges, when I could make the most of them?  Why allow the bad guys to hoard my country’s assets? Why not milk America for all its worth in an attempt to assure certain standards in health and legal protection for citizens worldwide?

And there I was, at the center of it all.  The emblem, as we know all too well, of America’s wealth.

I watched shiny black shoes smack sidewalk puddles and thought of my father in Yoff.  A policeman, he worked odd hours, oftentimes arriving home late at night.  While his dinner was being heated he would polish his shoes in front of the TV.  Every night.  I viewed this ritual as futile.  Never able to check my mental “why?”, I knew all too well the fate of those spotless shoes the minute they hit the sand streets.  

However, gazing out at the filled sidewalks, I reversed my position.  Why not?  Everyone is entitled to dignity, the choice of how to best display it is the choice of the individual.  I then remembered the shoeshine stand I had glimpsed in one of the many gilded lobbies.  

But that’s Wall Street, I thought.  

No, this is Wall Street, I corrected myself.