Except I haven't so much heard 'girl' so much as something more insulting and less appropriate for print. I used to hear such things years ago, but in my memory they were little more than whispers. Today they sound like screams.

I spent this past summer in working in Detroit, Michigan, commuting from Ann Arbor. I left my ' East Coast, liberal bubble' and headed into the middle of the country to a place I had never been. Detroit bears several not so savory reputations, and so after researching it I thought I had adequately prepared myself for what I would find.

I had not. In the city, if I dared venture out alone, men would follow me in broad daylight, yelling racially and sexually charged comments. They were angry and bitter. They would not stop following me, sometimes for blocks. I had to stop going to the pharmacy on my lunch break. I had to stop walking outside alone.

And when I wandered around suburban Ann Arbor, at the organic food co-op and in the art stores, I kept overhearing snippets of what seemed like the same conversation. Over and over, people would say, openly-stunningly-some variation on, "Of course I'm afraid of Detroit. I wouldn't go there. The blacks wanted us to leave and so we left. And now I'm not ever going back. Why would I?"

I did not have to check my gut; it immediately informed me: I was, and still am, ashamed. I had never lived somewhere I perceived such open acknowledgement of, and comfort with, a seemingly unbridgeable racial divide. And then I looked around and realized it wasn't so much about acknowledgement, as it was about absence. To my unscientific eyes, Ann Arbor seemed almost devoid of black America. Other major ethnicities, Hispanics and Arabs, seemed largely missing too. And yet I had chosen to live in Ann Arbor, because I felt safer there. I was part of the problem.

I wanted to know the answer; I wanted to help 'fix' Detroit. In my spare time, such as on the seemingly endless 45-minute commutes between the city and the suburb, I would consider grandiose plans that the state could enact to pump funding into parts of the city. I planned forward-looking infrastructure that would foster diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities; a major new campus for the University of Michigan, small-business loans, art projects, etc.

But I knew those plans would be the work of a lifetime, for many people working together, willing to invest time and energy ... people willing to go back-and people willing to allow other races in. But Michigan was not my home-I was only visiting.

Instead my summer in Detroit served as a warning sign.  I returned to DC, where the whispers had actually turned to screams of a 'racial divide' in my city. Alarm bells sounded in my heart. The recent mayoral and city council races had boiled over into what commentators were calling a 'populist uprising' where one racial group was telling another that they wanted them to get out. I was told, by columnists like the Washington Post's Courtland Milloy, that this was the black population in DC telling me, apparently a 'young white urbanite' of the 'creative class', that they did not want me here. They did not want my ideas, my tax dollars, my company, or my nose in their business. Milloy and others seemed to be telling me to shut up and go home.

I was devastated. I have lived in Washington, DC or the suburb of Silver Spring (literally a few hundred yards across the boundary line into Maryland) for just over a decade. My entire adult life I have chosen to make DC my home (and purposefully declined Northern Virginia, frankly, due to the noticeable lack of diversity). When I first came here as a bright-eyed undergraduate, I worked in the Shaw neighborhood with public school students. I was told about the history of segregation in the city and then the riots and fires. I heard the debates about gentrification. But I saw the city being rebuilt and empty storefronts being filled. I saw a mutli-ethnic and multi-racial city reducing crime at a quick pace and generally improving life for its citizens. I saw a city filled with hope and plans for the future.

For a time at the very beginning, when I lived and worked near U Street, people would yell variations of "white 'girl' go home." Sometimes they would throw rocks and bottles, projectiles that sometimes broke car windows but luckily never hit me. Today I forget what all of my various--silent and internal--reactions were, but one of those reactions is the same as it is today.

This is my home. The people who live here with me are my neighbors. Together we make up a community. I choose to live here and I choose it in part because of who else is here. I care what happens to my city and I care what happens to my neighbors. I want jobs, amenities, education, infrastructure, culture, and art... for everyone. I don't want crime. I don't want corruption. I want diversity. And by diversity I mean I do not want to live somewhere that is missing major demographic populations. Is what I want really so different from what my neighbors want? I find that difficult to believe.

Still, wants and wishes do not successful public policy make. After being told I was unwelcome and unwanted, I spent the night listening to speeches by the late Robert F. Kennedy and wondering how we move forward. I did not get very far other than to solidify my resolve.

I do not have answers. But I know that no matter where we live, DC or elsewhere, we cannot give in to certain narratives. We must have vigilance against the idea that racial cannot be bridged. Overcoming them may be the work of a lifetime, of many lifetimes, of a community working together. But if we allow complacency to creep in, if we accept the divides as anything other than an obstacle to be overcome, we may come to regret it. Someday, we may find that the divide has widened so far, and views have hardened so much, that we can no longer even see the path forward.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Harper Lee's landmark novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird", an anniversary I celebrated. I would like to learn how to walk around in another man's shoes. But I think I need help from my neighbors to find my way.