Barbara Jordan

For the last year, I have attended the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, where I was one of 200 students representing 74 nations. I spent that year with African and Afro-American students. I left this accepting environment to come home to Los Angeles.

Returning from the airport, I listened to Barbara Jordan’s speech and was deeply moved. I have lived here most of my 18 years and many times I have been subjected to black racism. I departed from an atmosphere where I shared food with a Kenyan and a black Ohioan, to a city where black street vendors raise prices for me, where many blacks refuse to be civil with me, because I am white. I want to be, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “judged not by color of my skin but by the content of my character.”

RACHEL LUNDGREN, Beverly Hills