On my first day at Stereohyped, I was asked by some readers what qualified me to work here (ie "What's your race?"). I was taken aback by the query and upset by its inherent assumptions. My boss thinks I'm qualified, I wanted to scream at the firing line, do you sign my checks? That said, I'm willing to admit that part of my anger stemmed from this fact: I didn't know that I was qualified. Full disclosure: I'm not even half black. My mother is of German descent and my father is part black and part American Indian, an ethnic pairing appearing in my lineage thanks to a ribald ancestor who had a stint as a Buffalo Soldier. I am an amalgam, an alloy part, and at the time I didn't feel comfortable saying that to people who seemed to be hungry for a, yes, black or white answer. My skin tone and indecision were one taupe mass.

To better pick my way through this existential dilemma, I started jotting down the incidents in my life that have made me feel truly, unshakably African American. Soon, I had composed what I hope you will indulge me enough to read, a very general glimpse into what I believe to be my "blackness," the credentials that explain my employment at a site devoted to black culture.

I hate lessons, but if I learned anything from this particular creative process, it's that though I am not by birth an archetypal African American, I have been presumed to be and treated as such, for better or worse, many, many times over the course of my history. I learned that my black experience can't be spoken of in terms of black and white. It's red like anger, green like envy, an energetic yellow and, far too often, a deep, dark blue.

I hope that no matter what color you are you'll be able to relate to at least some of the following, especially the bad parts. As I've come to know, the worst of times are almost always the most enlightening.

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What is the black experience? Newspaper reporters write lengthy stories, for which they interview people leaving church and waiting to get their hair done at the salon, about it. Politicians drop it in their speeches. In moments of laziness, I surely refer to it on this blog. What experience is universal among all black people? Besides the obvious — existing in our various shades of brown skin — I would argue that black Americans share the experience of living in a society, a world even, that's dominated by people who don't look like us and, even if some of us have never felt it in person or experienced it first-hand, being of a race that has been judged, stereotyped, stepped on, and discriminated against, in varying degrees, since the United States as we know it came into existence. Many of us, but not all of us, share church-going habits and religions. Many of us, but not all of us, share food preferences and family traditions. But, culturally, how much do we all have in common? A lot of us have been discriminated against directly, but many of us haven't. No one has ever spray-painted "Die Nigger" on my garage door, but knowing that it has happened somewhere out there in suburban America to people who look like me for the sole reason that they are black still makes me sad, still unsettles me, still fills me with a dull sort of anger. If we have nothing in common in our present lives, one thing black people share is history.

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