ABSTRACT
The author was born in the summer of 1995 at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to a black father and a white mother, the first of three children to come. Her parents were both resident directors, so her family had to live on UCLA's campus, steeping her in the diversity of the students and staff. Her parents made a concerted effort to keep our friend groups diverse and were a notoriously kind and justice-oriented couple, both well loved in their respective fields and positions on campus. As a little brown boy with short hair she was mistaken for every nonwhite racial group under the sun. A white woman once approached my mother and asked her, without an ounce of shame, if “the father was Mexican,” while my black father was sitting right next to her.
