Libération no. 4 Illustration: Jules Julien I was eating breakfast in the kitchen of the suburban Michigan home I grew up in, a temporary pandemic evacuee from my grown-up life in New York City, scrolling through my news feed, when I heard my parents bickering in the next room. From what I could tell, they were trying to find a news segment that my mother thought she’d saved.
My parents had grown up in Detroit surrounded by Black people. It wasn’t until they were adults that they found themselves living and working among predominantly white people. But I was raised in an overwhelmingly white suburb and went to mostly white schools there. I didn’t think they understood what that was like for me. The times I remember bringing up my feelings about being the only Black kid in my classes, their response was always, “Don’t let them talk down to you.
I’ve always seen him respond to negative situations with a positive solution, even when I wished he’d leave it alone. There were countless times when he would come to the school because he thought he had to speak up for me. Sophomore year, after two years of training and being the only girl at golf camp for two summers, I didn’t make the golf team because, the coach said, I was too young for varsity. But after my father talked to the coach after tryouts, the next thing I knew I was on the team.
I hadn’t. When they moved to this suburb in the early ’90s, when I was 2, there weren’t many Black families, he said. It was a new subdivision. The backyard faced a giant cornfield, and there weren’t sidewalks yet. My father loved to run. And this area—still practically the countryside back then—had lots of room for exercise.
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