Rose Over the Cities, 58th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): My parents didn't want me to know my grandfather was African-American, or that my great-great-grandfather was a plantation slave for the first 30 years of his life. Papa died when I was five, so I have no first-hand memories of him, and they raised me in all-white suburbs and sent me to all-white schools. I was in the eighth grade before I had my first non-white classmate. 

Papa had light skin thanks to mixed-race marriages and probably going back to plantation rape. He could pass for white, although from what I've learned he embraced his African-American identity even after he married my (white, Irish) grandmother and raised my Dad and his sisters and brother. I think Papa was something of a code-switcher, representing civil rights cases in court one day and benefiting from white privilege the next as best suited his needs.

My parents didn't want me to know but I found out anyway, after Dad had passed away and when my Mom was too old to discuss it with her in any meaningful way (she's gone now, too).

I don't believe my parents hid the truth from me out of racial animus. They were your standard-issue, Kennedy-Johnson Democrats, and taught me that the civil-rights movement was a good thing and segregation and racism were bad. I think their intentions, although misguided, were for their children to have the greatest possibilities in life, and in their minds, formed as they were in the 1940s and '50s, identification as an ethnic minority was a "stigma" they didn't want their fair-skinned children to endure. It wasn't hatred, but it was a perpetuation of self-fulling stereotypes that allowed and even perpetuated racism. 

Our work isn't done until, as Bob Marley sang, channeling Haile Selassie, the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned. When that philosophy is accepted "for the sake of the children," it's the white children that benefit at the expense of the others. 

I can't change my past of my upbringing, but I can rise above the small-minded bigotry of previous generations.