My daughter and me in Chicago During a recent trip to Chicago, my daughter and I were walking outside the Art Institute of Chicago when she observed, “English is the language I’m hearing the least here. It’s refreshing.”

Now hold that thought, and please indulge me for a minute as I hop down a rabbit trail. (I promise it’ll make sense, eventually. Well, maybe promise is too strong a word. Let’s just say I hope it will make sense.)

When I was a kid growing up on the 1960s, I was fortunate enough to attend an interracial school. Perhaps because of the heightened racial tensions we were experiencing in American culture at the time, our teachers made a point of helping us little white kids to appreciate “colored people” and even taught us negro spirituals like “Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” (At the time I assumed the…