Julie Bayley,
Bronx, NY
p>I am so tired of being “classified“. As with most people of darker hue on this side of the diaspora, I am not simply black I am a first-generation American born of immigrants who came here from the Caribbean that gumbo contains Maroon, Spanish, Irish Scottish, and Taino. I will never forget being 10 years old and having a census taker sitting in our dining room becoming frustrated with my mother because each time she was asked to identify the race she said “human”. This was in 1970 that lesson has never left me. However, I’ve had to live in America as if that lesson never existed
