I was born in Chicago, IL, in 1965. My mother is white, and my father is black; my parents relocated to California a year or two after I was born. My parents moved around California for the first 13 years of my life from San Francisco's Bay Area and down towards Santa Cruz, CA, within the Redwood Forest moving every couple of years.

Race had rarely been a subject I realized growing up transitioning into many different schools the first thirteen years of my life. When my mother wanted to get my sister and me into childhood acting, the talent agency told my mother, "The world was not ready for biracial children."

My father passed away three days before my 16th birthday, and shortly after that, my mother remarried another black man who is still my stepfather today. My stepfather was in the army. We continued to relocate with every assignment my stepfather received.

My race became an issue as soon as we relocated to Texas. I was unaware of what race any of my friends were until 9th grade. This was when I was approached by leaders of the Black, White, and Hispanic groups in school, telling me that I needed to identify with one race or the other. As many of my friends know, I did not take too kindly to being forced to identify with one side or the other. So, I told them all to screw themselves, and I'll be friends with whoever I damn well, please. That led to many altercations in school for the entire time I lived in Texas.

Texas was the last public school I attended; we then moved to Colorado and graduated high school in Vicenza, Italy. The schools on or near the military bases were never racially segregated, nor was race a subject matter of contention.

The question "what are you?" or" what's your ethnicity?" This has been a question my entire life since I was a teenager. Racism was not only in public; it was also within my family. My great-grandparents never wanted to see my mother's children because they did not like to acknowledge the fact that we were half-black. As a young teenager visiting my grandmother in Arkansas, I remember traveling down the road with the top off in my grandmother's Jeep, and we happened to stop next to a school bus loaded with children. As the children looked out the windows at us in the Jeep, I remember one of the children yelling out the window, "look at the little nigger kids," And my grandmother turning around to tell us to just ignore those ignorant kids.

When I turned 40, my mother confessed that my father, who raised me as a child, was not my biological father. So as I began to get older, I started to have questions about my ethnicity, health history, and who my father was. This is a story for another time, but as you can imagine, anyone receiving this information would have many questions.

I consistently identify as Bi-racial, and when anybody has questioned me about what I am, I've told them that I'm half-white and half-black. Now with technology and access to DNA information, It's not as simple as half-white and half-black.

I have found a new sister through the DNA search of my ancestry and trying to find my father. Technology in today's world gives us many abilities to find truth through science. Today I identify myself as biracial, but I question why, in this world of technology, we are still classifying ourselves into colors? Why shouldn't we be identifying ourselves by our heritage? The world is made up of so many different types of ethnicities, and we should be identified by them instead of grouped into generalizations or categories.

I am British, Irish, Scottish, French, German, Scandinavian, Nigerian, Gannon, Sierra Leonean, Senegambian, Guinean, Congolese, Angolan, I am American