 Black History My brown daughters became black when they were six years old They were watching television one day in February Black History Month a commercial came on It was more like a 30-second history lesson a commemoration of a pilot a poet or a politician a First black as a writer I know calls them Them being the racial pioneers the inaugural Negroes the foremost African-Americans to break through racial barriers They're chosen fields by breakthrough. I mean of course secure the regard white people See we're black Julia said to Isabella. No, we're brown Isabella responded. Yeah, but they call it black Julie explained Despite my efforts to shield them my daughters had somehow gotten wise to the absurd and illogical nature of American racial identity Blackness Juliet figured out had nothing to do with skin color blackness. She had come to understand. It was an external identity External to her anyway Grace was something other people identified something they said but not necessarily saw Blackness she had to it was a social category not a color, but a condition and like it or not It was time. She was informing her sister to get with the proverbial program in spite of me But also because of me my brown daughters were becoming black My heart sank. It was not blackness per se that caused my heart to sink My parents, you know Understandably They were they were raising us as children putting us on buses every day To go into environments. They could only imagine we're gonna be hostile I mean, I don't know how they did it, you know, and it was so important You know if they hadn't willing to put literally their children's bodies on the line There would be no desegregation, you know, the world would not have moved along. It took that kind of commitment And I don't know how they did it I'm not faced with that team kind of challenge today But I think in some ways this book is about and I'm realizing this I'm talking to you about putting myself on the line in the same kind of way trying to honor and meet their Struggle and to say thank you for that, but the book is for that for that person You know, I when I met wrote it I imagined the kind of book that I could have used when I was a kid That have helped me not actually met my way along the journey That could have been a friend to me as I was making my way along the journey And that's what I hope people can do for any kind of reader But my daughters were not born under the shadow of this history They're black by ideology and affinity but not by blood When they were 12 months old they assumed dual citizenship in both America and African America