Special Agent - washingtonpost.com:... Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he had known guys like the one he was pretending to be, but he had avoided them. He was the Boy Scout who never used drugs or smoked, the kid who worked his way through Catholic school and college, who had gone on to command a platoon in the Marines.
'I wanted to stand up and tell everybody, 'Yes, I'm a black man,' ' he said. 'But I'm an FBI agent. I was in the Marines. I'm a college graduate.
'People were looking at me like I was dirt. Like I was trash.'
And there it was. For his entire life, Mason had been determined to not be defined by race. But race was a formidable foe. Even though he knew the arrest was fake and he probably would never see the onlookers again, the feelings had cornered him there on the ground -- and they cut deep.
