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Don't you worry, keep your balance
- Erykah Badu, Otherside of the Game (Baduism)

Here's the thing: I'm White. Quick once told me that there is no such thing as White American Culture. She pointed out that American culture is, in fact, a result of a blending of all the races and nationalities that make up the United States of America. And it's true that so much of the defining characteristics of American culture actually come from non-European sources. Think Jazz, Blues, Rock-n-Roll (no, Elvis did not invent that), Hip-Hop, JLo, and the Great Plains.

And yet there is also this crazy split-personality public perception that in order to be beautiful, you have to be pale, thin, blonde, with no ass. That straight, white men are the ones with money and access to power. That Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans are poor and disempowered.

Ow. My brain hurts. I was going somewhere with this.

Right. So when I was a kid, I had blonde hair and blue eyes. I came from a middle-class family in California. Most of our neighbors were non-Hispanic Whites, to use the U.S. Census Bureau term. But when we moved to Connecticut, I experienced first-hand—without the language to realize it, of course—the intersection between class and race. Connecticut enjoys the dubious distinction of having the largest disparity in incomes in the country. In other words, there are very rich people there, and very poor people. My mother, not having millions in a trust fund, didn't fall in the first category. Even worse, in the mid-1970s, she didn't have a Man to Provide for Her.

Without such a resource, we lived in the the PJs. Most of my neighbors were African-American or Latino. But to complicate things further, my mother sent us to babysitters in a middle-class "White" neighorhood.

And herein lay the dilemma: people didn't quite know what to make of me. Sure, I had pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. But teachers who had access to my records looked at my address and automatically placed me in the same class as the rest of the kids from the Projects. (I remember my mother admonishing me to use my great-aunt's address instead of our own on school documents).

White kids in my babysitters' neighborhood saw my secondhand clothes and free school lunches and shunned me because I was obviously lower-class.

Black and Latino kids in my neighborhood saw my pale skin—and later, saw that I was placed in the "gifted" classes along with middle- and upper-class white kids—and made fun of me for being a Mama's Girl.

The kids in the Projects scared me. The kids at school shunned me. So I went to the library a lot and read.