Today, I awake from a dream. Eyes open, I face the world around me.

I drive the streets of my town, where the scarce pedestrians are African-Americans too poor to afford transportation. I hum past bus stops where the only faces waiting are dark.

I’ll sit in an office where, one room over, the sales reps cackle at mean-spirited characterizations of destitute others as derisive labels pour forth. It devolves. “Pickaninnies,” “jang-a-langs,” “jigs,” everything that doesn’t begin with an “n.” They call African-American gathering places “Mozambiques.”

It’s hardly surprising for a business where a colleague once characterized a local chef with White House experience as “just an uppity nigger.” The remark elicited no rebuke from superiors around him as they considered his connections, presence and attitude invaluable to the business.

I’ll listen to a boss who defends former Sen. Trent Lott’s well-documented racial imbroglios. I’ll grit my teeth as he bloviates on African-Americans – “Canadians” he says in the moment – and their greater likelihood to “work the system” of government aid. 

As I leave, I pass a public school in the block behind the business, a place where the parents waiting in line to retrieve students are 99-percent African-American. The private schools here – “seg academies” they were called – exploded when desegregation finally took hold in the 1970s. Even now, the polar racial composition between public and parochial schools is unavoidable.

I’ll steer through downtown, avoiding the steel barricades that announce the arrival of Mardi Gras parades in mere weeks. The celebration is a last stronghold of Jim Crow famously documented in the 2008 film “The Order of Myths.” Change comes like desert rain to this ostensible deluge of joie de vivre.

I’ll spy a young lady in antebellum hoops and lace, then recall the city ambassadors, teens adorned as symbols of a system hung from a framework of human misery, slavery, feudalism and racial supremacy. I’ll also think of our U.S. senator, a hometown boy who sent these costumed visions of romanticized oppression to greet the nation’s first African-American president just one year ago.

I’ll roll past 19th Century mansions built on lives condemned to shackles, shaking my head at the Confederate flags that still flutter over porticos.

I’ll eat lunch with an old friend. In discussing another buddy, the ugliness will creep forward. “I always knew he’d do well,” my friend says.

I agree. The man in question was first-rate, had great character, bright, good ethics. The three of us were tight years back. My lunch friend had witnessed the problems caused by prejudice, the hate that bubbled up when our African-American pal married a white girl, a young lady that had been one of those hoop skirt-adorned ambassadors in her youth. We all knew why they moved west, the difference in atmosphere for their children, the greater opportunity. Their success was respite in a world that too often seems to reward the unscrupulous.

“I always knew he’d do well,” my lunch companion reiterates. “People always liked him. And, of course, the black thing helped.”

I stop chewing. The flood of resentment dammed by his terse phrase drowns my mood anyway. I hear the waves of white anger and enmity toward affirmative action lapping.

So how could he do that? How could he chalk up our old pal’s success to something that irks him, something he considers unfair? How would he feel if our friend heard him say that? 

My companion says nothing more, just chews and looks through me.

At home, I answer the phone and talk to an aging relative. She wants to know if I “still have a phone like all the blacks flip out,” mild displeasure evident in her voice. I shake my head. “No ma’am,” I answer, “I have an iPhone now. It doesn’t flip open”

I turn on the television and see our African-American president. I go back a year to his inauguration and the excitement of the time.

I glance at the coat rack by the door, at a fedora and wool coat. The slate-toned hat belonged to my great grandfather, a former sharecropper in rural Alabama with the expected views on racial matters. The long grey overcoat was my grandfather’s, a man who once proclaimed the Democratic Party finished because “they’ll never do anything with a nigger leading them.”

I recall my satisfaction at donning those dapper duds when my wife and I attended an inauguration party on that chilly January night in 2009, a fancy celebration held in a traditional locus of local African-American culture. To me, that hat and coat were talismans of what had been, of old times and systems. I wanted to drag those spirits there to witness. I wanted those clothes sanctified in a baptismal experience.   

I’ll look at this historic president again and wonder about the other substance in a celebrated martyr’s vision. What of the underclass, the address of poverty and inequity the Good Doctor highlighted? How does this new president’s continuation of policy, his soaking of the haves in time-honored tradition, how does that fulfill or deny those aspirations that rang across the capital? Does shackling Americans to the whims of industry truly free us?

The tone of this president’s skin might call to mind the Good Doctor’s reverie, but the color of his actions looks little like the reverend’s most crucial aims. It feels so much like “more of the same.”

But finally, my eyelids will slip and I’ll drift away again.

Dream. Of swelling voice and flaming words aloft above grey-toned crowds and shimmering waters. Of heads nodding and eyes wet with sweat and tears. Of hearts rising and hope renewing.

Dream.