Nobody handed me a manual.
And nobody handed you one either.
I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, adopted into a white family who loved me completely and understood almost nothing about what I was carrying. Not because they didn't care. Because no one had ever given them the language for it.
I grew up in white neighborhoods. Went to white churches. Sat in classrooms where I was usually the only Black face in the room. And I learned, the way you learn when no one says it out loud, that who I was at my core was something we didn't talk about.
That silence wasn't mean-spirited. But it was costly. A child who never sees himself reflected in the world around him, who never hears his heritage spoken about with pride, who never has a single adult in his life who looks like him — that child starts to believe the different thing about him is the wrong thing.
I was that child. And I carried it for decades.
