My background tends to be different from most. I was adopted at six weeks old into a white family. I was the second child to be adopted into this family and both my older adoptive sister and I were biracial, half black and half white. This racial mixture led to a lot of uncomfortable situation growing up being because we looked black and our parents were both white. I struggled with an identity crisis in middle school trying to figure out if I was white or if I was black because I never really fit in with either crowd. I remember volunteering at an inner-city summer camp and all the kids were around 6 years old and they were all black. One day for lunch they were having collard greens, which is something that I had never had before. So, when I tried them and did not like them the first question that these 6 years-olds asked me was,” Were you raised by white people?” This seemed like a strange question to ask, but I learned that collards greens are an African American culture thing. Since I did not like them or know what they were even these little kids could tell I was not raised in a black culture.

So if I’m biracial which culture do I belong to? That was the question that I tried to answer for so many years. One of the largest issues that I was found was in the types of music I listened to. My parents are Christians and always listened to a lot of Christian music in the car when I was growing up. They also liked the listen to country music so of course, those were the genres of music that I started listening to. However, when people started telling me that it was weird that I listened to county music because black people listen to rap music I switched to listening to rap. But it wasn’t for me in the long run. This segregation in the genres of music is the main point in Segregation of Sounds by Miller. He brings up the point that different genres of music were categorized based on peoples race. For example, hip-hop and rap or black music and country and pop are white music.

These stereotypes of music and culture did not help me to find out who I was really was. So as I grew older I learned that I don’t fit into a mold or a stereotype. I have raised my white parents, I talk white (which is apparently is just being able to use propertEnglishsh), my clothing choices are a mix of both white and black,  and my music playlist is a mix of everything. I no longer let stereotypes that society has conjured up over time define who I am because I am not white and I am not black, I am both. I guess that kind of makes me a rebel but I think it just makes me, me