Being born the color of light brown sugar and living in a country of prejudice is difficult. Prejudice is alive and well in the United States, it’s just more subtle than before. Being ‘too white to be black and too black to be white’ and welcomed by neither, I am often on the outside looking in at society as a whole. My father was the product of a mixed marriage and his coloring passed to his children. The joke in our family is that if our parents had continued to have children, eventually they would have had a pure white one!

My oldest siblings had it easier in an all-black school, in my opinion, than I did in a mixed one. The quality of education was different and the pressure to fit in, less. The only white people who accepted me were, sort of, outcasts themselves…the hippies left over from the 1960s and early 1970s. They didn’t see color, only people. Acceptance by blacks in general was never mine to enjoy. I don’t know why actually, though I do have some ideas, most of which are out of my control…like the fact that I have a full head of hair that is both thick and long and the range of my singing voice.

I have tried hard to practice the Golden Rule. In fact, I have made it a point of being nice to all people regardless of their differences, inspired in part because of the way I was mistreated. Therefore, as I get older, I’m still looking for my place, my purpose in the grand scheme of things. Maybe one day I’ll finally find it.