By Lee A. Daniels

I was more or less idly reading the New York Times’ article last week about Sonia Sotomayor’s childhood fascination with the fictional heroine Nancy Drew when one phrase buried deep in the story came leaping out at me.

The series’ early books, written in the 1930s, were filled with racist stereotypes, especially of blacks. Noting that, one authority on the books and their broad impact, said, “one of the things I find so interesting about Sotomayor’s citing of Nancy is that even she, a Puerto Rican child, just looked past all of that and took away with her the essence of Nancy.” (my emphasis)

“That’s the way it was for me, too,” I thought. “That’s what I had done.”

No, I wasn’t a Nancy Drew aficionado. Nor did I have any interest in becoming a lawyer or a judge. What I did have was a fierce desire to achieve, to make something of myself, to be somebody; and, largely subconsciously, as a child and adolescent, I looked everywhere for sources of inspiration that would help me find-and make up-a path.

That search was no sad song. Though I grew up in a black red-light district in Boston, I was buoyed by a close-knit family and a close-knit black community around me. I also had the civil rights movement of the 1960s to teach me many invaluable lessons.

And, as paradoxical as it may seem, the final piece of this tapestry of inspiration came from attending a rigorous public examination school that was then all-male and 97 percent white. This was a school that prided itself on a fierce allegiance to the traditions of European classicism and the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony-and  an unshakable, impartial commitment to a harsh attrition rate. From the 1920s to the late 1960s, two-thirds of the boys who entered it did not last to graduation.

In my first year there, I was on the way to becoming one of them. Even as a twelve-year-old, I knew that I was attending one of the repositories of the white tradition, and, in a way that was not obvious to my schoolmates, it unnerved me. All of the faculty and staff. All of the faces in the dusty, decades-old pictures of school clubs and athletic teams that dotted the hallway walls. All of the names of the three centuries of the school’s Great Worthies that ringed the majestic auditorium. All were white. I was a black boy, and nothing in that environment seemed to say I had a place there.

And yet, at a low point, when the prospect of surrendering to failure seductively loomed, my mind cleared. I realized I did have a place there, if I looked past-that is, did not allow myself to be blinded by-the whiteness of the environment. If I accepted the complexity of my situation. If I saw it, not as a predicament, but an opportunity. If I saw myself as equal to, and an equal in that school and that tradition.

Once I looked past the racist meaning of whiteness, then I could accept the beauty and value of the school’s classical traditions and add them to my growing pride of the black American tradition. It was then I felt at home there.

Ever since, I’ve always considered the ability to look past the racism of America’s past crucial to any child of color’s ability to rise to be a psychologically healthy adult. By looking past, I don’t mean ignoring the racist sins of the past, or avoiding grappling with their effect on our present. I do mean not allowing that necessary contemplation to derail the pursuit of the full measure of one’s American citizenship. Since then, I’ve always thought the greatest issue children of color in America face is what to do with the anger that their first encounters with America’s racist tradition-be it in real life, or books of fiction, or Hollywood films-produces.

Sonia Sotomayor responded to that dilemma in the right way. Despite the racism in the books she devoured, she determined that she would thrive. In doing so, she was following not only her own heart and mind. She was also following a tradition far older than America itself.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.