Every day when I pick him up, it’s the same: “How was camp?” I ask. “Great!” he answers, still sweaty from the pickup football/soccer game he and his pals have just been playing.

Camp these last two weeks has been Future Builders, the everyone-can-come version for middle schoolers of Bridge Builders, which is something high schoolers need to apply for and be sponsored to do. I am always on the lookout for places for Tomas (and me, too) to meet people who are different from him, racially, economically, socially. I mean, this is Memphis, after all. But in 2011, we all need to know how to do that.

With Future Builders, we hit the jackpot. What a terrific program.

As with everything these days with my rising seventh grader, I sometimes have to wait for the good stuff. The other night over dinner, I tried again: “So, what do you talk about at camp?”

Well, racism, he said, and began to tell me how sometimes people “stereotype other people,” and think they know about them just because of how they look. He was obviously quite clear about it, and eager to explain how it happens.

“Are you a racist?” I asked him at one point. It’s a tough question, and one I heard the great Lucius Burch once say everyone ought to consider.

“Sometimes,” he said. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

It took moving to Memphis, a city in which I am a minority, for me to finally understand the corrosive power of the snap judgments we make about people because of their race, their politics, the way they look, where they live. I am so grateful that my son, a Memphis native, is able to learn how to ask the tough questions at the tender age of 11. And isn’t fazed one bit by whatever answers he comes up with.

Thanks, Future Builders.