In answer to the Day 1 Question “When Did You First Realize You Were Black (or X)?”
When I was about 8 or 9, in the early 70s, I loved the Jackson 5; I built up a whole pre-adolescent fantasy of Michael coming to my backwater town in western Pennsylvania and somehow meeting and falling love with me. My ultimate dream was to be Mrs Michael Jackson. This dream was shattered when my older sister told me in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t marry him because he was black. For some reason, I had no comeback to that. Much later, many other reasons emerged as to why I couldn’t marry Jacko, but none of them shut me up like that first one.