Tiny nalgene

my whole life i have existed in majority white spaces. i went to a white school in a white town where i lived with my white family. i spent my summers at a white summer camp run by a white religious organization. i'm used to these kinds of spaces, and feel pretty comfortable in them. i know the right things to say at the right times. i know so well how to opperate in these spaces that i am so frequently told that i'm not really black, that i'm different than other black people. even though i know these messages are bullshit, they're hard not to internalize.   

For some context: I went to elementary school at a K-8, "alternative" public school. This meant that some classes (1/2, 3/4) were combined grades, and some had two head teachers in the classroom (my 6th grade class was taught by a married couple). As 7th and 8th graders, we had "Humanities" class in place of History & English, and our curricula alternated between "Justice and Dissent" and something related to questioning "American identity" and race in the United States. There's a lot to say about the way race functioned in my elementary school education, some of which I've already mentioned in class (discipline and the beginning of tracking, as well as the masking of systematic and institutionalized racism behind socially conscious curricula, for example).