WHITE PAPER FAMILY
THE FIRST TIME I realized race was a Thing, I was staring at a pile of magazines in preschool surrounded by a sea of pudgy White faces. We were all huddled together for our first official school assignment. The only brown kids there were me and Juan, the sweet Mexican kid who taught me how to tie my shoelaces. The teacher was instructing us to make collages that represented our families. All we had to do was dive into the large stack of magazines on the table, cut out pictures of people who resemble our family members and paste them onto a piece of paper. Easy enough. I have always loved a collaging moment – even way back then.
As I flipped through the pages, I saw smiling White ladies in pristine kitchens, cute White babies wearing Pull-Ups, handsome White men in power suits, White kids picnicking on Crayola-green grass. I had never heard anyone use terms like “representation” before; all I knew was no-one on any of those magazine pages looked like me or my family. It reinforced what I had somehow already internalized: I was different. Other. An oddity living in a White world.
My mom continued to try to circumvent the lack of diversity at school by instituting her own informal cultural literacy program at home, doing whatever she could to ensure that her mixed kids were fluent in Black culture. She enrolled me in West African dance class and
