Being a man of color, but more specifically a Black man at Columbia University has certainly influenced my outlook on this country and my people's position within it. Now, the significance of the title of this article is threefold so I'll state and address them in turn.

For the first 17 years of my life I never spent a day outside of the Bronx. From kindergarten to senior year of high school I had never attended any private or specialized school. These two statements speak to one of the meanings of "I Wasn't Black Until College" which is that when you grow up exclusively among minorities, or in communities where the mainstream majority has been reduced to the minority, you are less aware of your minority status to the country at large.

Granted, I was often one of the few Black students among my classmates who more often identified with their Hispanic ethnicity. However, and especially in the lower grades, our differences in complexion or background was rarely a topic of conversation or concern.

It is for this reason that I was never very much aware of the fact that I was Black, because to the people around me it didn't matter. Or so I assumed. And this isn't to say that there was harmony among everyone and race/color never mattered. Most of my obliviousness probably came from the fact that I was young and very socially unaware in general.

But the exception to the oblivious period was during middle school when this one group consistently made jokes that displayed a ridiculous amount of disrespect toward the struggle and conditions of African Americans in this country over the centuries, but as I had not made many of my gains yet there was not much I could do besides ignore them.

I knew matriculating to Columbia would mean being surrounded by white people, but that wasn't really a concern of mine. I didn't know about the performance that us as Black people feel the need to put on and even now I do not perform much, but am usually aware of my minority status in whatever space I'm in.

Another reason I say I "wasn't Black" is because a lot of my peers, even during high school, would make the claim that I wasn't. "You're an oreo, Black on the outside, and White on the inside." They told me this because of my posture, taste in music, the way I dressed, did my work, but most often because I did not use slang or curse. These were all behaviors instilled by my mom, and for some reason I latched onto them as hard as I could.

The sad thing is that I took pride in the fact that I was seen as an "oreo" and would only reject it to support my claim that they could behave the same way and that it did not require any internal whiteness. Looking back, I also regret my retort that speaking "proper English" does not make me white on the inside. I hate the fact that I felt proud every time I said that. As if the way I spoke was superior when in fact it was just out of place.

I would never go back and change any of my behaviors, I just wish I could go back and enlighten younger me and those around him. We were all trapped by what we thought the stereotypical Black child should say and look like and do.

Starting sometime in middle school I even stopped identifying as Black, but instead as African American. However, this was more because I rejected the identifier "Black" as a whole, because I felt it ignores the connection to our origins. I was annoyed at the thought that we should be the only group that is identified by a color that does not even match our complexion, instead of a geographical location. Up until high school when I filled out forms that asked for race, I would check the box next to African American/Black and either cross out the latter or circle the former.

Seeing as what Black people in the America have been called and have called themselves since being brought to this continent, I still find it useful to think about this question. However, I have become more accepting of the term because as a universal identifier. I still refuse to call anyone or be called "the N word".

However, the most unfortunate part of it all is that I so badly did not want to be that stereotypical Black child. While it is probable that everyone of my peers could have named characteristics of the stereotypical Black image, I was probably the only one tailoring their behavior to not display them.

This is the third prong of the title and the one I regret the most. The distancing myself from that stereotypical image ultimately led to me distancing myself from my culture as a whole. So upon arriving to college, I received the shock that so many things I thought the stereotypical Black person did are just things Black people do.

Even before I took Introduction to African American studies, I had been doing a lot of reading about social issues during my gap year and realized how uninformed I was about a myriad of topics. But I finally began embracing my culture and coming into a fuller understanding of it and our struggle as Black people here in the United States.

But how did a young, unaware, Black child decide to start emulating behaviors foreign to the ones he typically saw around him? It's simple; home training. Now, I did not say good or bad home training. What I am saying is that home is where most children receive their values and that is where I received mine.

So am I blaming my mom for instilling anti-Blackness in me? Of course not. I am blaming the institutions in place that made my mom think it necessary to instill those behaviors in me to avoid getting shot by the police. That is literally where it all ties back to. My mom instilled these behaviors in me because she desperately did not want me to get stopped by the police, like ever. And this started before the media began covering the unjust and disproportionate loss of Black lives like Trayvon Martin and more recently Terence Cutcher along with so many others.

I could not leave the house with a hood, fitted cap, or my pants sagging down. Yes, because she thought they were unappealing, but more so because she knew that racial profiling was a thing and that cops target young Black males who fit the description of wearing clothing that is typical across the Bronx. She even warned me against certain neighborhoods, not because the neighborhoods were dangerous in themselves, but because she knew I'd be more likely to be stopped by police in that area.

Fortunately, she instilled those behaviors in me before I developed my youthful invincibility complex. And I guess you could say she was successful because I am 20 years old and to this day have never had a negative encounter with law enforcement. But now I realize that even with those behaviors, luck has played a tremendous role in this feat.

I will credit my younger self with one thing. In junior year of high school I switched my intended career path from corporate law to civil rights law. This happened after I took AP U.S. History along with a class on sociology and was put onto the very true notion that systems and institutions in the United States are set up to not only to the advantage the majority and/or the rich, but also to the disadvantage of specific minority groups and/or the poor. I was only given the one example of how public schools are funded and immediately decided I wanted to do something.

And even though, I cringed when Facebook showed me my one post about Black on Black crime, I realized that my reasoning behind it wasn't that we are doing harm to our own communities so why are we complaining about other people doing harm. Instead, it was that I felt more confident in our ability to pick ourselves up together as a community, than in how much the government cares about our issues since more often than not, they are perpetuating it to the advantage of another group.

I cannot say my opinion on this has changed and while wanting to be a civil rights attorney requires that I defend my clients rights against the government (at least in the way I want to practice civil rights law), I ultimately want there to be less of a need for my work. Yes, there will always be injustice, but I want there to come a time where a mother does not feel the need to distance her children from their culture in order to avoid that injustice.