I approach the topic fearful of the unsurpassable barrier you’ve been taught to keep up; afraid that my words, though we speak the same language, will sound like a foreign tongue, and that you’ll treat them no different than the thousands of deportation cases that are skimmed through each year. A sudden storm in front of you, you’ll try to piece fragments of torn air together as my shaky hands try to explain; you’ll perhaps glance right through the message because I don’t appear confident enough in my own skin, but don’t misinterpret my quiet voice for uncertainty because, if there’s one thing I’m certain about, it’s that I’m not the first to wish they could shout from the top of their lungs at an audience that had earphones glued on.
   

So I’ll pretend you can barely hear me as you listen to that new song on your playlist, the one you play on repeat. You seem to have forgotten that you can hear without really listening, so I hope you can catch my voice as it lingers uncomfortably in your conscience, as you decide whether or not this is “something you’ve already heard before”.
     

Can you recall the number of times someone has improperly used the color spectrum to place one on top of the other instead of aligning us equally as if incapable of acknowledging that we are gradients of the same color wheel? There came a day in which society decided that white should be the ultimate achievement and black should be an avoided abyss, because once stained with pigment the odds will forever be against you.

We are raised to believe that success in life requires strategy and diligence but we realize, sometimes too late, that the rules of this game are in fact based off complexion. These rules are established for us and against us from the moment we take our first breath to the day we will take their last.

   The day a child is born into a family that doesn’t identify as white is the same day they are forced to recognize that color will have a different meaning in their vocabulary. This reprehensible requirement will mean the boxes checked in forms will always categorize them as a minority –– a term that I myself couldn’t quite picture when I was surrounded by faces of varying shades of brown, when the Spanish flowed off my classmates’ tongues as easily as English did. Checking off the box under Latin American would mean the flight I boarded to Mexico wouldn’t be seen as a vacation, but rather another familiar road home.

A common dilemma will include: being too American in your parent’s home country and too ethnic in the country you were born in.
    

Throats have gone dry not because they were at a loss for words, but rather from growing tired of the difficulty in explaining something that has been evolving beyond a textbook’s timeline; something that will continue to develop like a question with an incomplete answer. We were given words like oppression, discrimination, and inequity as synonyms to fill a void you are still making excuses for, to make sentences out of something history only recognizes as unfortunate. When maps were created, those dotted line borders were meant to be self- explanatory, but it seems you never had enough ground to begin with as you built barriers within the minds of each new generation.
   

Despite what they’ve said, don’t hesitate when you use the word “racist” and try not to picture an angered, darker skin toned version of yourself yelling at the other end of the sentence. Acknowledge that your appearance will be the first thing that is taken from you, something you own that others will use more than you will. 
   

At this point I’m shouting at you, the same audience that was taken aback when Angelou herself shouted, “take the blinders from your vision, take the padding from your ears, and confess you've heard me crying, and admit you've seen my tears.”

So I ask you to confess that you can listen just fine and to admit you’ve seen our tears, to admit we’ve shed tears.