In his book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, former President Jimmy Carter pinpoints the first time he was aware of racial prejudice.

Growing up as the son of a white landowning family in a mostly black community, he played with the black neighborhood children. For him, they were simply playmates.

Then one day he and his friends were going through a farm gate. His black friends fell back, allowing him to enter first. He thought they had set up some kind of childish trick—something in the path, perhaps, that he was meant to stumble on. Then he realized that they were giving precedence to him because he was white.

A thousand thoughts must have clicked in his mind. That was his first understanding of a system that favored one group of people above another because of skin color.

His pilgrimage toward understanding the absurdity of racial prejudice mirrors the journey of many Southern whites. Some of us who struggled on that journey are now amazed at the strength of prejudice in this day and age.