By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial, but just as black. A white classmate of mine from middle school
just posted her recollection of this. Of course, that was an oversimplification of my story, but that was what made sense at that time. Adults who loved and knew me, on many occasions sat me down and told me that I was black. As you could imagine, this had a profound impact on me and soon became my truth.
Every friend I had was black, my girlfriends were black, I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager. Never have I once identified myself as white. Not on forms, not for convenience or privilege, and not for fun and games, have I ever identified myself as white. I was never a white guy pretending to be black. Not once, ever, did it occur to me that I was being phony or fraudulent or fake. Quite the opposite—I always believed I was living the truest form of my self.
My freshman year in high school, another student and I got into a huge fight at a football game. The fight ended up setting off a powder keg of racial tensions at our school. The school paper back then referred to me as black and him as white. We were suspended for three days and while we were out, racial tensions boiled over so much that hundreds of white students staged a walkout because they had just been banned from wearing Confederate flags.
When I returned to school from that suspension, the collective anger of the racist white students was focused on me daily. Dozens of my close friends experienced this racist hate alongside me and it broke us down in the worst ways. I was consistently called ******, spat on, had a jar of tobacco spit thrown in my face, forced into fights, and on two different occasions chased by pickup trucks attempting to maul us. In 2007, one of the students in one of those trucks wrote me a beautiful, moving apology for calling me a ****** and more on that scary dark night.
I published it back then.
In March of 1995, it all boiled over and a racist mob of nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides, then, when I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds. That day changed the entire trajectory of my life. Thankfully, multiple credible, unbiased eyewitnesses to this traumatic day
have come out publicly and spoken on my behalf in the past 48 hours. A few days after I was assaulted, I was at home recovering when a group of rednecks literally pulled up in my driveway at night, but were chased off by a neighbor with a big flashlight. That neighbor
just posted his memory of it.