Though Norwood is merely five miles north of downtown’s city center, it may as well be smack dab in another time and another place with its barely-there lane lines, its shameful-but-glaring classism and racism for a city its size and its perpetually broke and broke-down demeanor.  

It’s 2013 already. The rate at which calendar pages blow past means there’s not enough time to school you on the ever titillating suffixal differences — which are also cultural and racial — between the -er and the -a. White folks want to say the word soooo badly it’s funny.    

I was a ripe, sitting target for a bully when I entered the fourth grade at Heritage Hill Elementary School in Springdale: I was a shy 9-year-old; my single mother was settling her three kids after abruptly leaving our father and bouncing about in a station wagon.   

There is a lot wrong in the brutal beating of Pat Mahaney, a 45-year-old white man, by six black teenagers in North College Hill. Sadly and somehow brilliantly, this is a teachable moment about to pass us all by if we don’t start grappling with and then telling some truths.