Personal Narrative: I Grow Up In A Caucasian Community

For my entire life, I grew up in a Caucasian community - a privileged suburb area where everyone around me was a different race than I am. As a child, I never wondered how it shaped who I was as a person. I never thought about race, I never thought that my upbringing in this neighborhood would change others perceptions of me. I knew that I was black. I did not know that people expected my race to be my personality.

A recent death in the family leads me to a gathering in which I would have to meet up with family members who lived further south than I had ever been before in my life. Unlike my neighborhood, this area was completely black. I felt so out of place here, and as time went on, I realized that I completely did not fit in at all.