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My surface is as Caucasian as my name: very white skin, reddish blonde hair, blue eyes.  I came to hate that surface!  I sometimes thought, "If one more person comments on my coloring, I'll have a screaming fit!"  Living in the tropics at high altitude my skin is now the color of sunburn on white and with age my hair has turned to a hideous yellow.  The 'white' community accepts as white only pure white.  As I said before, I am not pure white.  If the Caucasion genes were mixed with African, I would have had a large community in the U.S.  My genes include indigenous American ones --- that community rejects me as completely as the white.  I keep on my desk a black-and -white photograph of myself.  It shows a mixed-blood old woman who could be taken for Mexican.  Without that dramatic coloring my bones, my real self, predominate.  That photo is the antidote to my mirror.