Pink vs Black — A Rude Awakening

A racial journey in fits and starts

There’s a picture of my dad holding me in the hospital on the day I was born, his jerry curl dangling in shiny coils above my face. If you look closely, which I’m sure I did, you’ll find a Mercedes Benz with diamond windows nestled in his chest hair. My dad’s beaming down at me through heavy square-framed Cazal’s. My mom isn’t pictured, but somewhere in the room, I’m sure she was smiling at us through her grey-blue eyes — the quintessential picture of a happy family. There’s a knowing look on my face, however, a recognition of a weighty circumstance. I imagine I looked back at my dad on that day of entry into America, took in the diamond Benz, the color of his skin, and thought, damn…couldn’t they have given me something easy? One of those lives where you can just coast? Maybe I was Black in a past life. Maybe I was white and had an understanding of the benefits. Either way, I had some grasp of the gravity of the situation, because I was born in the 80s, less than twenty years after the United States Supreme Court officially made it ok for a white person and a Black person to marry each other. I knew from the get it wasn’t gonna be easy, and it’s all over my face in that photo.

Several years later, not long after I’d gotten a handle on words and the concept of stringing said words together, I declared…