I am 75% black and 25% Cherokee Indian. My father is black brick layer from Mexico, Missouri and my mother is half black and Cherokee Indian from Macon, Missouri. When asked what race I am on informational forms I use to say black because there was no opinion for multiracial people until 2000. As far as my ethnicity goes, I'm a little confused. Even though I am black, I’m not African nor do I practice any African culture. I am part Indian but I have no ties to the native culture either. So I can only conclude that I am of American ethnicity. Growing up as a kid I was naïve to race for the most part. Up until I was eleven years old, I can't remember being singled out because of my color. It wasn't until Jimmy, the white boy from up the street told me he couldn't invite me to play basketball in his backyard because he parents didn't like blacks; that I even realized that racial issues even existed. I guess after that event I began to open my ears and make sense of my father’s scaling words, “The White Man ain't gonna give you s*** for free. You gotta work twice as hard to get everything.” Anytime my sisters and I didn't do our homework or misbehaved in school we got the “white man speech.” Born in 1955, the year Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for not giving up her seat for a white man, Emmett Till was killed by a white man and the Civil Rights Movement was being set in motion, my dad had a different view of racism than me. I could see how his views reflected a world ran by white men with no promising future for any other race. By no means was my father racist, he had white co-workers that came over the house all the time. I don't think that his goal for us was to dislike them, he just wanted us to know that we were born into disadvantage because of our color. I started out my high school years making friends with many different races and ethnicities. I was a part of many different school programs that thre