We were making copies using the ditto machine in the teacher’s resource room of our school.
When the teacher’s aide – we kids called “slap jaw” – walked through the intoxicating fumes of the duplicating solvent to talk to us.
She asked us where we were going to high school – we both replied Sullivan. She pulled out her copy of the Gale Echo – our school’s yearly black and white booklet and opened it to the centerfold exposing the pictures of the graduating 8th graders.
Slap jaw thrust the paper and a pen towards me and asked me to autograph my light-greyish picture, saying I would be famous one day.
You were standing next to me, my sister, my desk mate in our “gifted” class, my friend for as long I could remember, our fate sealed by our shared initials R-F-R, your dark-greyish picture next to mine.
I remember looking at her, looking at you, then looking at her again. Perhaps I had a stupid smile on my face, thinking she just forgot, a simple oversight, she was an old white woman.
I remember that pause – that moment it took slap jaw to realize she should ask for your autograph too, but it was too late. She exposed our differences.
Freshman year of high school, I was labeled white for the first time. I’m not white. I’m a child of immigrants.
I played basketball in high school.
We played all-white suburban schools outside Chicago. We played all-black south and west side schools in Chicago.
To some, I looked more like suburban white than south side black.
When I fell in love with a black man from the west side, he told me I wouldn’t be accepted by his people. To his family, friends, and neighbors, I was white.
I remember feeling my love is no different.
In high school, I labeled myself a half-breed – something I heard or read someone call a Native American whose parents weren’t both Native.
But was I a half-breed German or a half-breed Cuban? What half of what breed would I be?
30 years later I received my AncestryDNA® results. I remember looking at the colored blobs over parts of the globe where my people came from.
The European continent was aglow in a rainbow of blobs.
90% of my DNA is European Mutt, my ancestors traversed the lands from Spain east towards Poland, from Scandinavia, south to Italy and Greece.
The other 10% comes from the continents of North and South America, Africa, and West Asia (the middle east).
The complicated mess of my DNA is a result of wars, colonization, slavery, revolutions, migration, immigration and everything in between.
My DNA unites, rather than divides.
I may not look like you. Our phenotypes make us look different to each other. But when we look inside we will find our similarities.
Aloha
Why do some people feel the need to review past events?
You know what I’m talking about…
Helped me brush them off…
In March of 2016, I found out I got accepted to an 
