I have two contrasting stories to begin this post.
The first: six months after I was baptized into the Church, I took a job based in Brazil. Two weeks after I moved there, the bishop called me in and gave me a new calling: Young Men’s President and Sunday School Teacher for the Youth (two callings in one!). Given that there were only about eight men in the ward with the priesthood, these callings should not have been a surprise, but they certainly were at the time.
So for about a year I taught the youth for two hours nearly every Sunday. And after I had been there for a year I was visited by a friend from the States who came to Sunday School and said to me, “wow, it must be strange for you to teach a class filled with black kids.”
I turned to him and said, “what are you talking about, they aren’t black.” But then I stopped and thought about it. And indeed they all were black, and I hadn’t even noticed. I had been so nervous about simply doing the job, and so anxious to do it right, and so nervous about learning Portuguese and teaching in Portuguese, that I had never even thought about the race of the young men and women — I had simply seen them as young human beings being taught by a very imperfect teacher who knew less about the Church than they did.