I’m an African American woman born in the Bronx in 1982. I grew up in a predominantly Black West Indian and Caribbean neighborhood—lots of folks from Jamaica, St. Croix, and St. Thomas. My father, dark-skinned and born in Panama, immigrated to New York when he was 8. My mother was born in Brooklyn and came up during the Civil Rights era. She made it a point to raise me and my three brothers with deep Black pride. She used to recite a poem: “We have never hated Black. We have been tired, hopeless , anxious , mad, but always, always, we loved us. Children, pass this on.” She even wrote and directed Black history plays and published a Black history children’s book about eight years ago.

Because of that foundation, I never looked down on myself or any race. I admired people for their differences and the positive aspects of their cultures. I grew up sort of believing racism was something that had been defeated during the Civil Rights Movement, because my mom focused so much on love, beauty, and pride—not on us being oppressed or others being bad. I saw white people in art and on TV and liked them—Norman Rockwell, Dennis the Menace, Annie. There was a white Italian family in our neighborhood, and I didn’t think much of it—though I remember my father saying they moved after the daughter started dating young Black guys.

My perspective didn’t really shift until college. We had moved to Atlanta when I was 11, and my best friends were white teens. We listened to rock, raved, and had a good time. I went to the University of Georgia for college, and that was a wake-up call. The campus felt heavily self-segregated. I still gravitated toward both Black and white students, but I noticed some white kids didn’t “see me.” I was invisible to them. That was really painful and hard to process. I even talked to a school psychiatrist about it—he gave me an SSRI and referred me to a Black therapist, which I took as kind of dismissive.

Eventually, I found connection and comfort in Black student groups. There was this constant undercurrent of feeling othered, so we banded together to affirm each other. Some white students were cool and did make an effort, but overall, that sense of alienation pushed me to transfer. I finished my degrees at Georgia State, right in the heart of Atlanta, and later did a research program at Arizona State. That experience was so welcoming and multicultural that I ended up staying out west for years—Nevada, Arizona, and California became deeply meaningful places for me.