ABSTRACT
The author is not sure that she was ever conscious of gender, her gender, until some point during her mid-thirties while working on her master’s degree in higher education administration. Honestly, issues of class, capital, and power seemed much more salient to her in understanding her own experiences. To understand the story of Maya, the author have had to reflect upon the legacies from which she grew. She was raised by her mom, a single parent, and her grandma, also a single parent while she was raising her children. Both of these women struggled to carve their own place in the world while trying to help author find her. They both believed in the promise of education and impressed that upon her. Although author was not yet born during Kennedy’s and Johnson’s presidencies or the height of the civil rights movement, the history of hope permeated her upbringing as a biracial daughter in a White family of a single mother.
