Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

—E.B. White

Today’s story is from Pierre O’Rourke.

For years I told anyone who would listen. My father was no father at all. The drinking, the carousing. The child support checks that never came. Mom and I moved away when I was nine. I would not see him again until I was a man.

The young Pierre and his father

“Maybe he did the best he could,” said my ever-forgiving mother, time and again. She and Dad kept in touch — some. She even sent him my report cards and letters. But I refused to write him a message or even acknowledge him.

But one night, one movie, one memory suddenly changed it all. I discovered that Dad was not so much a bad dad as a horribly haunted man.

Home from college, Mom and I plopped down, TV dinners in our laps. The movie: 1964’s “Black Like Me.” James Whitmore portrayed a white journalist going undercover as a black man. He traveled through the deep South. The insults. The denigration. It’s no easy film to watch—especially knowing it’s based on a true story. READ MORE