In some neighborhoods, if you want to walk down the streets, you've got two choices - look down, or look hard.
When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better.
St. Louis has a lot of weird food customs that you don't see other places - and a lot of great ethnic neighborhoods. There's a German neighborhood. A great old school Italian neighborhood, with toasted ravioli, which seems to be a St. Louis tradition. And they love provolone cheese in St. Louis.
I wanted to cut past the polemics and experience London's Muslim communities for myself. My first visit was to Tower Hamlets, an East London borough that is about 38% Muslim, among the highest in the U.K. As I walked down Whitechapel Road, the adhan, or call to prayer, echoed through the neighborhood.
To grow up in the neighborhood of handicapped people was an important experience for me. I learned back then to treat them in a very normal way.
I represented women with unplanned pregnancies from age 14 to 40, and they range from living in their car to living in the nicest neighborhoods in town.
Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.
People don't know that New York really is just made up of a group of very small neighborhoods.
I got into a lot of fights, but it wasn't because of my name. Being from the neighborhood with a name like Chauncey, people think I got picked on. But a lot of strange names come out of the neighborhood.
I lived in an all-black neighborhood, followed by an all-white one, and other kids in the always called me Mexican in both neighborhoods.
