In 2003, a journalist named Katherine Rosman was at a party where she felt awkward and out of place. So she struck up a conversation with someone else who seemed to feel out of place. He was one of the few African-Americans there, and turned out to be a state senator. Later that evening, Rosman learned that one of the other guests had assumed that the senator was a waiter, and had asked him to get a drink from the bar.
This anecdote, which might not seem especially newsworthy, was reported in the Wall Street Journal in November 2008, because that state senator had become president-elect of the United States.
