What It Feels Like to Be the Only Black Person in Your Family

When I got to the largest high school in Lincoln, Nebraska I was in a building with around 2200 students, the most diverse school I had ever attended. For the first time in my life there were enough Black students to fill a lunchroom section, enough to have their own social circles, their own style, their own way of moving through the halls.

And I still didn't fit. I was somewhere in the middle of two worlds and neither one of them was making room for me.

I had spent my whole life around white people so I gravitated toward my white peers not because I felt like I belonged there but because at least I knew what that felt like. The discomfort was familiar. With my Black peers it was a different kind of uncomfortable. I didn't know their language or their style of dress. That kind of knowledge doesn't need to be spoken out loud. You feel it in how conversations shift when you walk up and in how certain circles never quite open up to let you in.

So I did what a lot of kids do when they can't find solid ground anywhere and started performing. I leaned into being the class clown because if I could make people laugh maybe the awkwardness I carried would come across as funny instead of strange. Candy and gum for everyone, drives to lunch for whoever needed one. I was buying approval any way I could find it, and looking back now I can see exactly what that was and how much it cost me.

Every holiday, every family gathering, every school pickup when other parents were around, I was the only one. You get used to it the way you get used to anything you have no choice about. But getting used to something is not the same as it not costing you anything. The cost is just paid in a quieter currency.

The question underneath all of it

There is a question that lives underneath the experience of being the only one, and most Black kids in white families carry it whether they ever say it out loud or not. It is not whether the people around them love them. The question is whether they fully belong, whether this place holds all of them or just the parts that are easy to hold.

That question does not go away just because it is never asked. It goes underground and that is where it does the most damage.

I carried that question through my entire childhood and into high school, performing for two different worlds at once just to feel like I had a place in either one. The anxiety that came out of those years still affects me at times today. It wasn't until my later college years that I finally started living on my own terms, and even then it was a process.

What changes when the question gets acknowledged

You don't have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to acknowledge that the question exists.

When a parent looks at their Black child and says something like "I know this family looks different from you and I want to talk about what that's like," something shifts. The child no longer has to carry the question alone and can put some of that weight down.

You are not going to be able to change the fact that your child is the only one at the table. But you can change whether they feel like the only one carrying what comes with that. That is the difference between being alone in a room full of people who love you and actually being known.

Your child deserves to be known.