I am Black. I capitalize Black and leave white lowercased. Sure, it’s the accepted spelling, but really I do it because it feels good. My family lived in Missouri, but my mother crossed state lines to birth me in Kansas. Missouri was a slave state. Kansas was free, and she wanted her children born into freedom.

I love being Black, period. I’ve been called a nigger, both online and to my face. Oakland police beat my uncle so badly that he spent decades in a wheelchair. He died in that chair and my family rarely talked about who put him there. I’ve got family in prison and the projects. I spent half my childhood in the hood, a crack house at the end of my block; the other half in the white suburbs where the only time I saw the cops on my block was when a guy got stung by a bee.

Again, I love being Black, the joys and the wounds, I embrace it all. My cultural affinity for Black identity informs my politics, of course, but it doesn’t define them. Nor do I possess a wounded attachment to the marginalization I experience as a result of racism, as We Are The Left would have me do.