"Wow, you are the whitest black girl I know." It was a comment I had long grown accustomed to hearing, one I never put too much thought into. It was funny at first, ironic. But sitting here at lunch with my friends speaking the way I had always spoken, behaving the way I had always behaved, the title is bestowed upon me once again and, suddenly, the joke is no longer funny. Am I supposed to be complimented or insulted? Neither, I realized later. The issue ran deeper than that. And finally I understood why she said it, why everyone said it.

She said it because with skin like mine, it's hard to tell which “side” I'm on. Black or white. My skin is a caramel mixture of the two and I loathe what they call me, Oreo. As if we are back in elementary school, gripping the wire fence, choosing sides for basketball. (I was always picked last since my lack of "black athleticism" disappointed everyone).

She said it because I don't speak the language of men with gold around their throats like electric collars that when they try to remove, shock them, sending submissive currents of electricity cursing through veins my friend may find familiar.

She said it because my clothes come from a mall, fondly referred to as "that place where spoiled white girls with green-pocket daddies go to buy their Armani and Q." Does she know that I was born in the ghetto where every night my mother dreamed of a better life for her daughter?

She said it because, of the eight black kids that go to my school, I am the only one they see in honors classes, the only one putting forth effort. How can she assume that white equals intelligence when Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, and Frederick Douglass, exemplified the very opposite?

She said it because here, you're either black or white and there is no gray in the rigid rainbow of straight lines. There are no words to call a person who does not quite measure the dimensions of the box you've put her in. Outcast, maybe? But she's kind. Freak, maybe? But she's hilarious! Scary, even? But her eyes are as weightless as tired butterflies who burst from their shelling and demand admiration.

She said it because she does not understand that what she really means is, “you're the black that doesn't settle or subscribe to false notions of inferiority, or linger in a culture from 1940.” But, mostly, she said it because she doesn't understand and of course I forgive her because neither do I. A long time ago, I resigned myself to ineffability. That is why God made me. I can see him now in his wooden shed workshop, assembling leftover scraps of creation and formulating a girl who discredits one size fits all.

Humans have evolved the tragic skill of meticulously tracing borders, formulizing worlds, cutting the rough edges off people as though they were made of paper. They’ve ventured every corner of the labyrinth God created and, with all the self-righteous satisfaction they feel warranted, sit themselves down to a nice little blue-sky picnic by the beach.

Yet when I appear, they scramble for their dictionaries and before they can turn a page, I spread my arms and demand that they look at me plainly and straightforwardly. Once they discredit their preconceptions of what a person should be, then, and only then, may they categorize me.

Until then, I am stored up in the attic, tucked away safely, like an odd knick-knack visitors peer at uncomfortably, not sure whether to voice their concerns or turn and run. It's warm up here so I don't really mind because a few boxes away are my friends, and they're okay with just calling me by my name. That's who I am after all and if there is no result for that on dictionary.com , then I'll write my own description on a scrap of paper called my life and when I am at the store and get that eerie look of well,isnt she exotic, I'll pull it out from my pocket and say here, is this better? They will read it and nod their head, somewhat satisfied but mostly disappointed that there's no real secret to my existence.

All I know for certain is my name and I can't really explain in a way the world is ready for who I am exactly. But I can forgive you when you toss me up quickly into the attic and discard my existence when there's a knock on the door. Though I won’t promise to stay up there. If one thing is for sure it is this:

I will not hide or ever be ashamed. I will lift my head proudly, the last one clinging to the wire fence. I will play to the best of the abilities that God has given me, not man.

White. Black. Everything, nothing. I love every part of me. 

What other choice is there?