Michelle Obama shares an incident from her older brother's childhood in her memoir, "Becoming Me".

"Craig got a new bike one summer and rode it east to Lake Michigan, to the paved pathway along Rainbow Beach, where you could feel the breeze off the water.

"He'd been promptly picked up by a police officer who accused him of stealing it, unwilling to accept that a young black boy would have come across a new bike in an honest way."

"The officer, an African American man himself, ultimately got a brutal tongue-lashing from my mother, who made him apologize to Craig.

"What had happened, my parents told us, was unjust but also unfortunately common. The color of our skin made us vulnerable. It was a thing we'd always have to navigate."

Equality takes many forms as Craig and Michelle discovered. Let's all work to create a world where all children, all adults are treated with equality without regard to ethnicity, religion, financial background or sexual orientation.

I remember years ago when my friend told me he first experienced racism when he moved to Canada. I had moved here myself from Los Angeles where I understood racism, having been shot at during the Los Angele riots but this was My Canada he besmudged. He educated me and of course I learned that there was no way I could understand his position, never. I was further saddened to discover years later the racism which existed in the British Columbia town I chose to make my home. Today I am reading about racism from the Obama's perspective as noted in this blog and I am reading Black Consciousness through Calvin Lawrence's eyes in "Black Cop". Lawrence identifies with Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama's brother's experience with Riding While Black. Calvin's dad bought him a 50cc motorcycle for school transportation. He loved the bike but there was a downside, "Police officers in Halifax would stop me frequently, and their attitude was 'Where did you, a black boy, get the money to buy this?'" "These interactions created a sense of fear and apprehension in me whenever I kick-started my bike."

The more I think about racism in Canada, the more I remember growing up in a racist house in Ontario. My parents hated anyone who wasn't a WASP-White, Anglo-Saxon-Protestant. So our Greek neighbors around the corner who I used to hang with regularly...my parents shunned them. Italians across the street. Ditto. And on it went. As adults, my siblings and I often talked about those years and none of us remember our parents having friends. Of course we knew why.