
…s knowing your parents’ new home state — Florida — will protect you before it protects your mother. It’s witnessing one of the most exciting conversations about race since the civil rights movement, and wondering whether you’re the white voice that should shut up and listen, or the black voice that should speak out, or the mixed voice that should ???. It’s the feeling that you belong nowhere, and not knowing what to do about that, and not knowing wh…
…hange her mind about what blackness looks like. It’s census reports that won’t acknowledge you, and a white friend screaming the n-word through his open window because someone cut him off in traffic. It’s that same friend turning around to say, “Oh. Sorry,” as though the problem is that you’re in the car, not his own racist inclination toward someone he’s never met.