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A short story is presented.

A short story is presented.

Of course, we didn't always have an easy time in the black community. As philosopher Simone Weil once argued, when the weak get together, they mimic the actions of the formerly powerful. My sister and I attended an Afrocentric school in the late 1970s, where I got teased and on occasion roughed up for looking so \"light, bright, and damn near white.\" My sister, being bigger, braver, and more visibly black than me, became my protector. There I witnessed the hypocrisy of black nationalism. While the school preached the Kwanzaa value of community, when it came time for the annual Christmas show, the Black Nativity, I was not invited to perform in it with the rest of my classmates. The reason was never stated, but I was old enough to know what was going on. I remember sitting in the auditorium on Christmas Eve, watching my Afroed sister sing \"Go Tell It on the Mountain\" up on stage with the rest of my schoolmates, and feeling that I was inadequate. Furthermore, when my father and I went out into the world together, we were often looked upon with suspicion by strangers despite his \"mixed features\" and our clear familial resemblance to one another. I wondered more than once during my childhood if I had been switched at birth with somebody else; in my racial fantasia, I imagined myself a long-lost Sicilian girl, the daughter of a Mafia kingpin. I envisioned a little black girl eating spaghetti somewhere in Boston's North End, while her family looked on in bewildered silence. In those situations where I was silent in the face of racism, where I \"passed,\" I felt a part of me die. I was a witness to the things that white people say when they think they're alone. My school friends were forever talking about \"niggers\" and \"spics,\" and then chummily patting me on the back and saying, \"Don't worry, Danzy. We're not talking about you.\" For me not to assert myself as black in these situations was an act of betrayal against those people whom I loved the most. It was also a betrayal of myself.

From C Chiawei O'Hearn (ed.) Half and Half: Writings on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural (1998). New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 12-13 and 22-27.

ONE OF THE best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a \"calling card\" by the conceptual artist Adrian Piper. I was in college at the time, and it felt like the ultimate inside joke handed from one racially ambiguous person to another.