High noon on a recent radiant Saturday afternoon I was happily walking east on 4th Street Bethlehem just past the popular Southside Malaysian eatery Jenny’s Kuali, when a man walking west locked eyes with me and growled loudly and menacingly, “Remember 911.”

911 is well worth remembering, but I didn’t think too much of the man’s prompting. He was dressed comically in oddly colored and mismatched string T-shirt and athletic pants and nervously fumbling an empty Gatorade bottle back and forth hand-to-hand. I took him for one of those sometimes scary but disoriented troubled souls you occasionally meet in public places talking aloud randomly and nonsensically. Like the end of the world is coming. Or Jesus loves you. That sort of thing. I thought of him as unfortunate and a subject for pity.

But when in a minute or two I bunched up at the Webster Street stop light with the two young women walking just a few feet ahead of me, I had a shock of recognition. They were slightly dark-skinned women in their 20s, country of origin unknown, speaking to each other in perfect English, and dressed in bright fashionable summer-colored hijabs – heads covered, necks swathed, bodies draped in soft flowing robes down to their knees – and for all that looking cool and comfortable in the summer heat. One had a name-brand backpack. They probably were Lehigh students.

Waiting for the walk sign, it hit me. The man was not a random troubled soul. He was a conscious hater. His words were deliberate, purposeful: to stoke my hate. What was I to remember about 911? That the horrible carnage, that the pulverizing deaths of thousands of innocent American lives were caused by dark-skinned people exactly like these sprightly women – so young, so vital, so alive – now blithely taking advantage of the wonderful sunshine and wonderful educational resources of our town – our town.

I was stunned by the epiphany. In my white skin the man assumed a moral complicity. In my white skin, he assumed a racist brotherhood. I could not obey the blinking sign to “Walk.” I am a Quaker-in-training. I try to see “that of God in all of us.” I failed at that moment to do so. e.e. cummings came to mind: “there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”