Monique Hollis-Perry
Alpine, CA

Military bases overseas were homes to many biracial families like mine, and my sister and I went to school with classmates who looked like us. It was many years and thousands of miles from being sent to Fort Gordon, GA as a test case in the 1960s to see how (or whether) soldiers with mixed families could live safely in the South. It was sobering to return to the States and meet people who found us “exotic”, “foreign”, and “strange”. These inquiring minds did not understand that kids like me came from two interconnected cultures: the military and the slipstream allowing us to draw from both parents’ heritages. For us, this was normal.