When I attended elementary school in Staten Island, my African-American friends would chant, “Janelly, you’re not Black; you’re Dominican!” I was only 10-years-old and was already experiencing a racial identity conflict with which even adults struggle. The dubious remark made me question myself because my skin color was the same as theirs, “why am I not Black? How am I different from my classmates?” It slowly dawned on me what my friends referred to as Black had nothing to do with my skin tone but instead with my ethnicity. My classmates perceived me as a Latina. My parents are from the Dominican Republic and I speak Spanish, so I assumed my classmates were right. It was at this point that I began to look at myself through the eyes of others.
