I am black. I am adopted. I have white parents. I have brothers and sisters of every other race under the sun, also adopted. So…Who am I? I was born in a city that was mostly black. My birth parents were black, and I lived in the “ghetto” culture until I was eight years old. I had very southern dialect, which overtime became “proper English.”
People expect blacks to be loud and in your face, poor and uneducated. We are statistics. Did you know that they know how jail cells to build by the number of black boys who cannot read on a fourth grade level in the fourth grade? They see it as, the uneducated are troublemakers, and to a certain extent, they are correct. Most of the people in prison are the poorer and uneducated. But, maybe if we would build these kids up, they would have the confidence to finish school. Both of my brothers are in trouble for being “harassing and a threat to other students,” and they are both black and one of them is in the fourth grade. When he was in second grade, he was friends with this rich white girl. One day, he was upset that she wanted to play with someone else at recess, so he started calling her names and that sort, and she went home crying to her mother that she was afraid to come to school. The next day, she comes up to him and wants to play. My mother was puzzled, she was so afraid to come to school, and yet, she acted like nothing happened? Wow. Yep, that’s my black side coming out, you could say.

My white side, you could say, comes in everything else. I listen to country music, write poetry that has nothing to do with my heritage, and don’t like collard greens, or loud church services. A few of my black friends say that I am “too white.” That I need to be “more ghetto.” That I talk like a white girl, that I don’t wanna embrace my heritage. I’ve been called a white girl in a black girl’s body. And the truth is, I grew up listening to country music, I don’t like cooked veggies, I don’t know if I could a poem about my heritage and do it enough justice, and as far as the church services go, I think the fact that so many brother and sisters can get together and make every Sunday a big celebration, the noise, well, it’s not noise to me, but I’d had to get used to it. If you went to Thailand, where they have special celebration every year that involves stabbing things through their cheeks such as vacuum hoses and swords as a part of worship, you would feel a little pout of place wouldn’t you? Yeah, I thought so. My White side.
But what’s with the sides anyway? I am African American. That is my race, not my attitude, not my identity, not me. I am me, Moranda, and I am every color under the sun.