I’ve told this story for a dozen years. It was deeply meaningful to me. But I just recently realized I was telling it all wrong. Because I got the meaning deeply wrong. If you’ve heard me share this story before a few months ago, I’d like to set the record straight now:

In 2005, I was working at a job training center in the low-income, mostly black and brown community of East Palo Alto, when the Four Seasons chain was getting ready to open a swanky 4-star hotel in the tiny strip of EPA that was on the “right side of the tracks” next to wealthy Palo Alto. The hotel pledged to employ local residents, yay. So we held a bunch of resume and interview prep workshops, and sent a group of our trainees over to the hotel to meet with the hiring manager. But they came right back. Like, immediately. Obviously too quickly to have interviewed. The trainer asked them why, and they said, “There was a gate. The gate was closed.”

I think the gate is gone now, as the area’s redevelopment has continued. But at the time, at least before the hotel actually opened, there was as I recall a big wrought-iron gate at the entrance to the long driveway, and a little guardhouse with a guy inside. Apparently our trainees, who were people of color, had seen that. And instead of going up to the gate and saying, “We’re here for our interviews,” they turned around and went back to home base.

That made me so sad. And that’s the version I’ve told for years. How sad it made me that our trainees didn’t realize they could just go through the gate. How grateful I was that my middle-class parents had gone to considerable trouble and expense to take me and my sister to fancy hotels and restaurants so we would know that we belong. How it was important to understand that some people hadn’t had that experience, and to help them learn that they can go anywhere.

Do you see it? How completely I missed what was really going on?

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably seen my recent posts about how I’ve been studying race, racism, and whiteness over the past few months. As I’ve woken up to seeing these things, revisiting this particular story was one of my most shocking moments of epiphany, when I felt the ground that I thought I’d known shake under my feet and then resettle into a whole new landscape I’d never seen. Here’s what was staring me in the face the whole time:

That story isn’t just about what experiences I had, that our POC trainees lacked. It’s about what experiences *they* had, that *I* lacked.

Sure, gates open automatically for me. But not for them. They didn’t misunderstand. I did.

By the time they got to that gate, each of them probably had a lifetime of experience where they had been carefully taught, explicitly and implicitly, where they were supposed to go and where they weren’t. And what the risks were of violating those rules. They knew that even if the guard accepted their explanation and let them pass, they would then go into the shiny marble lobby under a cloud of suspicion, with eyes following them every moment to make sure they behaved. Didn’t steal the ashtrays or whatever. Put a toe out of line and it might get even worse from there.

They knew what I didn’t. That gate was, in fact, there to keep them out. If not them in particular, Them in general. Those people. From across the highway. You know, the ones who you can just tell don’t belong.

We can say it’s because they’re poor. But those poor people just happened to be pretty much all black, Latino, or Pacific Islander in that area. But we won’t think about why that was, will we?

I certainly didn’t.

This isn’t about guilt or shame. But I deeply regret that I could have been more effective in my nonprofit work over the past 25 years if I had woken up to the reality of racism sooner.

Of course I am not done learning. I’m just starting. Belatedly. If you see more in this story that I should think about, please help a sister out in the comments.