You would never know by looking at him that the accomplished Washington Post columnist Nathan McCall had earned his journalism degree while serving time in prison. McCall easily fits our image of the Black Urban Professional. McCall didn’t come from an impoverished inner-city neighborhood but grew up in a middle class African-American enclave that drew families of means away from the ghetto. How did being Black create a diversion from the path of success that McCall’s parents sacrificially plotted for him? How did liberal white allies help or hinder the life choices he made? McCall’s dilemma speaks positively to our own feelings of inadequacy in race matters, both within the Church and beyond its doors.