When I was in first grade, I discovered the importance of race.
A little black boy proposed to me. In the midst of planning our wedding, he asked,
“How can we have babies when you’re white, and I’m black?”
What a strange question, I wondered internally.
My father is black, and my mother is white. And I exist.
But on the outside, I merely shrugged in agreement.

I grew accustomed to people asking me ‘what I was’. For a great amount of time, I found pleasure in answering.  But after many years, I grew tired of the insistent prying of strangers.
I took pride in my many ethnicities. They were an indisputable uniqueness.
However, the excitement I had once felt was replaced with a constant exhaustion that was inexplainable, and yet, so constant in my everyday life.

It never occurred to me to seriously care about my race. It was never important.
It never registered to me that the color of one’s skin factors into how they are judged.

And then I grew up. And I understood why my mother was always frightened for me, why my white friends acted differently around my father, why the color of my skin mattered so much to society.

People like to tell me what I am. That I have to pick one race- I can’t be all three. That I’m not dark enough to be considered ‘black’, that I just look white anyways, that my Native American relatives are so far down the line that they barely even count.
But I’m still a little girl inside. Because when I’m drawing, or exploring, or thinking, or getting dressed in the morning and looking at my reflection in the mirror, I’m not black or white or red.
I am me.