A black gunman hunts police officers at a peaceful rally in downtown Dallas. He takes out three cops at one intersection, sneaks up on another from behind. Bullets slice the air.

By the time the night is done, five officers will be dead.

When the shooting starts, James Waters is less than a mile away, working late at his law office overlooking Victory Park. An American flag hangs above his desk. From where he sits, he cannot hear the gunshots or see the crowd scatter in fear.

His phone rings about 10 p.m. It’s his wife, and she has seen the news.

“I need you to promise you’ll stay there,” she tells him.

It’s July 7, 2016, and the country is already on edge with racial strife fueled by police killings of black men. Alton Sterling, on the ground in Louisiana. Philando Castile, in his car in Minnesota, his T-shirt soaked in blood.

Frances Cudjoe Waters can envision what might happen if her husband leaves the office. There, he’s safe, well-known and well-regarded. Out on the streets, she believes, he’ll be just another black man, a potential target on this night of fear and fury and revenge.

James Waters reads his daily devotional in his office in downtown Dallas. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

James scrolls through the news on his computer. It has been a long day and he’s ready to go home. The drive takes only 10 minutes. He would probably be fine.

Probably. That small uncertainty captures what it's like to be African-American today. Making this decision, weighing the risks, when all you want to do is go home to your family, something you could do without a thought if you were white.

James doesn’t want to worry his wife. As helicopters hover over Dallas, he spends the night dozing at his desk, rumpled in his suit, waiting for the sun to rise.

A divide in America

The Waters family should be enjoying all the fruits of the American dream.

James graduated from Columbia University, the first in his family to finish college.

Frances got a degree from Stanford University, after her grandmothers worked as maids for white families, and her parents worked their way through school.

Both James and Frances went on to study at Harvard Law School, where they met.

They’re raising three sons — William, 16; Joshua, 15; and Christopher, 12 — in a safe and wealthy neighborhood in North Dallas. Their 5,800-square-foot home has five bedrooms, a diving pool and a tennis court in the backyard.

They’ve worked hard for this life.

James is a partner at a big Dallas law firm and holds board positions across the city. Frances is a United Methodist pastor who has her own strategic consulting company.

They’re so busy that every day feels like a sprint: a blur of school drop-offs and client meetings and “what’s for dinner,” stolen trips to Tom Thumb for raspberry sorbet and little moments of quiet.

"We did everything America said we should do," Frances says.

From left, William Waters, Christopher Waters and Joshua Waters eat breakfast with their father James, second from right, at their home in Dallas before heading off to school. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

And yet, when they step outside their usual circles in Dallas — where they feel not only accepted but embraced by friends of all colors — they cannot escape racism in America. No matter their credentials or accomplishments, they’re still black.

“We’re unprotected out in the world,” Frances says.

It’s not that they have been harassed by a rogue police officer — the mistreatment that captures headlines. It’s the thousand other ways they are made to feel criminalized, less than, invisible.

A hotel employee ignored their family at the front desk, only to help a white customer in line behind them. Was he racist, or did he just overlook them? A white guy at the airport rolled over Frances’ foot with his suitcase and refused to apologize. Was he racist, or simply rude? Kids at school joked that their son and other black students looked like a gang. When will it end?

This is the gulf in America that people of color feel every day. Whites live on one side, largely unaware it even exists. Families like the Waterses live on the other, exhausted by racial questions intrinsic in each day, each hour, each minute.

Questions of Color: Watch what Texans have to say about race, privilege and emojis

The dad

James Waters is 50 years old and a man of order. He has a trim mustache and a neat hairline. He folds his socks, which he stores in tidy rows. He wears a suit every day except Saturday, when he settles for business casual.

“Frances kids that I’m either in a suit or khakis and a polo,” he says, standing in their foyer, still in the suit he wore to work and a cocktail hour related to his board position with the Dallas Theater Center.

“Come on, it’s true,” Frances says. “I’m like, I want to diversify when we go out to shop.”

“I have jeans ...” James says.

"No," his wife replies. "You have a pair."

"I have two pairs!"

James usually wears quality suits because he thinks that's how a professional should dress, but also because a part of him understands that he is perceived differently because of his race. On more than one occasion, he says, he has gone out to lunch with clients and been mistaken for a waiter. Another time, when he was hosting an event at the museum, he was mistaken for the security guard.

If that happens when he’s dressed up, “what might people think if I'm wearing khakis and a blazer?"

James and Frances Waters greet others before the start of the 33rd annual H. Neil Mallon award dinner at the Hilton Anatole. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

James grew up in a military family in the “heart of God’s country,” Colorado, where he was one of the only black kids in town. He has become a man who defies stereotype.

He shops at Nordstrom but enjoys a good camping trip. He is fluent in Spanish, French and legalese. He’s also a James Bond fan and the family pingpong champion. At the end of the day, you might find him at his piano, alone in the dark, unleashing stress and gospel music from his fingertips.

James does not expect strangers in restaurants to know all of this at first glance. He does wish they could see the possibilities. People are complex, with traits and contradictions that extend far beyond skin color.

Two decades ago, he and Frances attended a fundraising gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They were thrilled to get tickets through work: Whitney Houston was scheduled to perform. First lady Hillary Clinton was in attendance.

An underdressed white man who looked to be in his 50s sat down at their table. He asked what event he was attending. He did not have a ticket, he explained, but lived in the neighborhood and often popped in when something interesting appeared to be going on.

“And that,” Frances explains, sitting on the couch next to her husband, ” is white privilege.”

The mom

Frances grew up the daughter of university employees. Her father was a professor at Harvard University and Wellesley College. Her mother worked as assistant director of financial aid at Tufts University.

Frances moved from the South Bronx to the white suburbs of Boston in first grade. When she got there, she says, her new school placed her in special education and assigned a white boy to teach her how to read. Meanwhile, she says, she had been able to read since age 3, and when her parents demanded she be tested, she scored high enough to skip a grade.

“We are always fighting against the presumption of incompetence,” she says.

She tells that story sitting in a cafe inside her neighborhood bookstore, where she reports that she has been followed.

Once, she was shopping for an Advanced Placement geography book for her son when she noticed an employee tailing her — from the travel section to the SAT books to the children’s area across the store.

In October, a hovering employee frustrated her to the point that she returned several hundred dollars worth of books and bought them on Amazon instead.

“I guess they think I’m very dangerous, right? So the lawyer-pastor is who you want to trail? But all they see is black.”

The black they see isn’t the beautiful shade of brown Frances sees when she looks at her family. It’s a stereotype, one she defies. But that shouldn’t matter, she says. “You shouldn’t have to have credentials to not be treated this way.”

Frances Waters speaks to the congregation at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Dallas. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

Frances is 46, with a heart-shaped face and clear braces that she clacks absent-mindedly. She’s full of energy, all hugs and high heels and ideas bursting forth. She moves and talks so quickly that, sometimes, she loses her breath.

Where her husband taps the pew to the music at church, she dances without restraint. Where he works behind the scenes on controversial issues, she publicly takes them on. Together, as a team, they do their part — because how else will anything change?

Frances knows that much progress has been made for African-Americans in Dallas. She and her family have thrived here, living an integrated — and in many ways privileged — life that her grandparents never could have imagined.

Still, the struggle continues.

“Right now, I think we’ve got to figure out a way to stop our children from being shot and killed,” she says. “Like, I need to live in a world where my grandchildren don’t get shot for being in a hoodie. Or walking down the street. Or playing their music too loud.”

She and her husband try to instill the right values in their sons, who say “sir” and “ma’am” and know to shake hands when they meet someone new. But they can’t control how the Waters boys will be perceived.

Christopher Waters falls asleep on his father James' shoulder at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Dallas. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

The son

William Waters wanders into the living room one Sunday night. He’s in athletic gear and a Yankees ballcap. His arms are long and wiry, budding with young muscle. A shadow of a mustache sprouts on his upper lip.

“What’s for dinner?” he asks.

His mom sighs.

“You didn’t eat?”

“Can I order pizza?” the teenager asks.

“Um, probably,” Frances says.

But first, she wants him to change for a family portrait.

He doesn’t respond.

“William. William?” she claps her hands. “William! Words!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, his head burrowed in the cracked screen of his iPhone.

William Waters talks with his mother, Frances, about upcoming events at school before she drops him off. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

At 16, William is the oldest of the Waters boys. He’s mature enough to know about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, about the July 7 police ambush. But he has only just begun to process what it means.

He’s busy with his own life. He has honors and AP classes to think about. He’s on the student council and debate team, and in the school musical. He recently bought red roses for a girl he likes. And he really, really wants his driver’s license. His mom has put that off for fear of what the wrong police officer might do to her oldest son.

William shrugs off questions about racism.

He didn’t like it when his football teammates sang along to raps with the N-word in the locker room, but he can’t remember any white kid ever calling him that slur.

There was this one time at his old school when the cafeteria served fried chicken and watermelon for lunch. “Oh, looks like William is going back for seconds,” he recalls his friends saying. “It’s your favorite meal.”

That’s stupid, he told them. His favorite foods are seafood and Italian. He doesn’t even like watermelon.

But William agrees with his parents that perceptions matter. When he was 10, it was his dream to become the CEO of Goldman Sachs. These days, he dresses like a 30-year-old businessman for school and church, carefully folding his J.Crew and H&M button-downs above his elbows.

Inside, though, he’s still very much a teenager.

Sitting in the living room with his parents, William puts off doing his homework and plays with a toy light saber that his little brother left lying around.

“Can I get a haircut tomorrow?” he asks.

“You just got a haircut, like, five days ago,” his mom says.

“Yeah, I know, but I’m supposed to be Drake for Tuesday.”

“You’re supposed to be who?” James interjects. “What is Drake? The singer-rapper?”

“The rapper, babe,” Frances tells him. “The rapper.”

“Why Drake?” his dad asks.

“Because it’s Squad Goals Day,” William says, a day to dress up with your friends at school.

“Did someone see you and say, ‘You be Drake’?” James wonders.

“No, I said I wanted to be,” William says. “What? You thought because I’m black or something?”

A safe moment

It’s early morning and the kitchen smells like bacon.

The whole family is here, eating scrambled eggs, bickering over who gets the last of the orange juice.

There’s Frances, on her feet, rushing to get everyone served. There’s James, in his suit, at his usual spot at the corner of the table. William has his sleeves rolled up above his elbows. Younger brother Joshua is wearing a T-shirt that spells out “think” using periodic table elements. Christopher, in his school uniform, uses a piece of bacon like a spoon to scoop up a big bite of eggs.

They feel safe in this moment. It’s a hard feeling to hold on to. The political climate has changed, dividing the country in ways that are familiar and frightening to people who look like them. They feel exposed and vulnerable.

Breakfast is over now. They clear their plates and get up. Frances bites into an orange as she hurries through the house, flipping light switches and corralling her children. “Lights!” she calls out to anyone who will listen. “Turn the lights off upstairs!”

The boys tumble into their parents’ SUVs. The family backs out of the driveway, out into the world.