My mother taught me that under our skin, we are all the same. Even though the "underprivileged" black girl that came over to our house once a week when I was in first grade to play had skin darker than mine, we were all the same inside. This set my imagination off and running, envisioning all our organs and their various hues of pink, coral, red, burgundy, all exactly the same. I don't know how my mother cooked up this parallel version of bussing to integrate schools—driving to integrate play dates—but in hindsight, I'm glad she did. But her assertion didn't make sense to me at the time, and honestly, I don't believe it now.

We are not all the same. Sure, our hearts act the same way, pumping blood, but they don't feel the same way, processing life. We have different upbringings, different cultures, different histories, and that makes us different. Not different better, or different worse, just different. But while her words may have confused me, her actions did not. I learned from watching my mother that differences are something to be embraced.

I'm happy to say, my son has embraced the differences between himself and the basketball players he has met from all backgrounds and cultures. Italians, African-Americans, Eastern Europeans, these kids don't necessarily talk the same way my son does, use the same language, see life the same way, respond the same in a situation as would my son or another player with a background like my son's—read white suburban, and that's fine, good even. For the players and their families, basketball in America today stands any prejudice of old on its head. The prevalent prejudice today in higher levels of basketball is against white suburban players. Ethnic or city white, better, but this player, too, will have to prove and prove again his worth on the court. No free passes for white players, unless perhaps they are really really tall. Is this the scale tipping back, after an interminably long history in this country of prejudice against people with skin any color by white? Maybe it is. It would certainly be time. In my experience, none of the players or their families today, white or black or anything in-between, spend much time or energy on this. It is what it is. Let's play ball.

Not so off the court as I learned earlier this month. My son's Division I college team had played another team in their league, one of the top leagues in the country. (I'm going to break the rules of good writing, and be deliberately vague here as my point is not to denigrate a particular institution of higher learning, or its graduates.) The opponent school is a bastion of upper-class white society, yet has had no white players of note on the team for years. Until this year. One of my son's friends, a really really tall suburban white player, is on the team. After the game, a home one for my son's team, we were eating a late lunch, myself, my husband, a family friend, my son and this friend from the opposing team. At a nearby table was a large group of people sporting the school colors, white skin, and the preppy attire normally associated with this opposing school. When the group got up to leave, the silver-haired man at the end of the table, seemingly the family patriarch, a spry, chipper man with the visiting team's school emblazoned across the front of the sweatshirt he wore, came over to our table. He extended his hand to my son's friend who we'll call Roger.

"Good game," the man said, with genuine enthusiasm. "Great win," he added, still shaking Roger's hand. He leaned forward over our table—of all white people may I remind—closer in to Roger who was sitting next to me, and lowered his voice. "Glad to have you with us." He smiled, gave a wave, and followed his group out.

Every single one of us at the table knew that what he'd meant with that third comment was "glad to have you, a white basketball player, on the team." On consideration, this seems like a fair response. My husband grew up in the same town I did. I didn't know him when I lived there. But when we got together after college, the fact that we shared such a commonality was important to me. It was comforting, gave me a sense of security, a feeling of ease. Because of this common ground, we spoke the same language, literally and figuratively in a lot of areas.

So why did I begrudge this same inclination to the white-haired man in the ankle-length khakis and school sweatshirt? To want to see a young man more like himself on his school's team? As his words hung in the air, and I replayed the intimacy with which he leaned in and lowered his voice before he made that final remark to my son's friend, why did what the whole exchange hinted at read very creepy? I don't know, but it did. I just hope I read the man very wrong.