When I go out with Asher, we become a perfectly calibrated barometer of the racial tolerance of the place we're visiting. In eclectic Brooklyn, we mostly get smiles. When we visited Atlanta, people stopped--I mean stopped walking in the middle of the street and stood stock still a few feet from us--as we passed by. Sometimes people beam at us with a kind of benevolence: The Obama generation, personified! Other times they stare poison at us.

It almost never bothers me. Only practical racism--the kind that actually affects my son--is what matters. But one day I lost Asher for a minute in a park and was running around, frantically shouting his name. A white parent ran up to me and asked what my son looked like. "He's wearing blue shorts," I blurted out, "and he's mixed!" Later, after I'd found him playing nearby, I wondered why I had said that. To help ID him? Or because I was so aware of the looks we drew? I think it was a little of both.

My past makes things a bit more complicated. I grew up in South Buffalo, New York, in the kind of working-class Irish-Catholic neighborhood where the guys wore Notre Dame jackets and the girls wore claddagh rings, and where my friends and I stood on corners in zero-degree weather and stared ominously at guys from rival schools driving by.

But black kids? If they knew what was good for them (and they did), they hurried through on their way to friendlier neighborhoods, eyes down. I can count the number of times I saw an African-American boy or girl on my block in 16 years. Seeing one made my heart race, out of the feeling that something that was not controllable in its strangeness and its violence was about to happen.

South Buffalo was a warm and vivid place to grow up, but it didn't tolerate race mixing. Or anything other than the white race. I had used the word nigger a couple of times myself.

And my friends and I never went to the black part of town, never got to know a black family, and never had a conversation with a black kid. The closest we ever came to communing with our African-American fellow citizens was at Buffalo Bills games, where we all agreed to worship (ah, the irony) number 32: O.J. Simpson.

O.J. was a god in 1970s Buffalo. If you insulted him in my neighborhood, you were likely to get your face smashed in. He was ours. But every other black American? Fair game.

When I married Marie five years ago, I have to say my family was wonderful. I'm sure my marriage caused a scandal back in the old country, but I never heard about it, which was fine with me. Some of my Irish cousins still call black people "the coloreds," without, I think, any real malice (one cousin casually used the term to my wife, to her great amusement). But it made me think twice about bringing my boy to Ireland's County Clare, something I very much want to do someday.

My friends all embraced Marie, but the subject of mixed-race children was touchier. When I told one friend that Marie and I were getting married, he responded with shock. "But," he said with real concern, "what about the kids?" I think he had two things in mind: Wouldn't they be bullied? And something murkier--the idea that race mixing wasn't natural somehow, that our children would be freaks. I couldn't help but think of this when I heard two voters' reactions to Obama in a recent news report:

"He's a neither-nor," said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, Alabama, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. "He's other. It's in the Bible. Come as one. Don't create other breeds."

"I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race," said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsville, Virginia, and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. "God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are and not intermarry."

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