I was born in 1980 in Seattle, Washington, to an African-American father and a first-generation German-American Caucasian mother. My dad was born in the South during the most segregated and prejudiced time in America. Both of his parents are black and were born and raised in Texas. My mom was born in Germany and moved to the United States when she was three. Her father was a Polish-American soldier stationed in Germany in the 1950s where he met and married my grandmother. I am mixed: half white and half black.

I am the oldest of four girls, and we all grew up knowing that even though our DNA was half white, our records and paperwork would likely still define us as black. I was aware of the “one drop” rule for blacks. Essentially, if you had one drop of black blood, you were defined, coded, and legally black. Both of my parents did a great job of making sure they reinforced that we were not just one or the other but both. A form would come home from school every year to verify personal information: address, birthdates, parental information, and race. My mom would intentionally handwrite “black/white” on our school forms under race. In the 1980s, there was not a “multiracial” or “mixed” box to check. The options were typically white, black, or Hispanic. The fact that we could only choose one made me feel like I had to identify with that one race. The system was forcing us to choose a side.

Despite my mom’s best efforts, every year the school administration would edit the form and select black as our race. It stopped bothering us, eventually.That was just how it is, we told ourselves. Mom, however, would not allow it to stop her from intentionally correcting the paperwork each year. One year, my third sister’s form was returned with the race listed as white. I recall us laughing until we cried because my sister was defined as white. We never had that option before. We had cracked the system! The school had finally not automatically chosen black. We just assumed our mom must have written “white/black” instead of “black/white” and they took the first option. I like to think that the school did not intend to label us.

My parents were intentional in raising us to embrace our birac