I was driving back to my house late one night in Monroeville, after my shift at the restaurant ended. I was on the phone with a friend when a cop pulled me over. I had merged in front of him, a completely legal move, but this cop seemed aggravated by some earlier occurrence and had decided to give me a scare. I was never made aware of the many things that can go wrong if you are a minority and a cop pulls you over. Why would I? I was lucky enough to be born racially ambiguous, meaning my skin was light enough that I could walk among Caucasian people, and half the time they would assume I was eastern European or Italian. Still, some instinctual knot formed in my throat that caused my stomach to churn as I automatically took the stance of submissive adolescent. The cop scolded me for my completely legal action for a few minutes and then got into his car and drove off.

I find myself riddled with guilt because I am lucky enough to have passed through the “random security check at the airport”, while the only other latinos in the line were pulled aside. Something deep inside me begged me to utter something in Spanish to throw the guards off. But, hesitantly, I continued to walk. I am a chameleon. This is not at all uncommon where I’m from. I have a lot of friends who could be mistaken for European. We all have traces of African and Indigenous in our blood that make us wonder, maybe that’s why my hair is so thick, or my eyes are slanted, or I tan easily. The DNA just expressed itself that way, as if the European colonizer blood took over and enslaved our other DNA traces, who are still screaming for a way out, still trying to be present, to find freedom.

My grandmother on my mother’s side wore wigs to hide her natural hair; she desperately tried to straighten it, tame it, make it Caucasian, but her father’s blood ran thick into the ends of her mane, resulting in beautiful tight waves. Pride is expressed when an individual of a darker hue finds love in someone "white-ish". The common phrase is “you are improving the race”. So why do I feel like my physical features are some sort of cultural betrayal?

For over a century, our people have found themselves at the bottom of the social latter that is the US. We are an entire community that has been used for experiments, for money grabbing, for corruption, as if we were property of the Caucasian leaders of “The Free World”. And here I am, some form of racially ambiguous chameleon, hard to identify in the mass of whiteness. The predators can’t see me as they target individuals with my same ancestry, because they are unable to blend into their surroundings. I am only in immediate danger if I open my mouth and my native tongue shows, or they catch a scent of the food I daydream about, but what of those who can’t hide behind closed teeth? How scary, at times, this world in which many are threatened by the physical presence given to another from before birth.