I was born to my blackness. It will never leave me.
I was born to softness and steel.
I was born to the privilege of growing up
On an island land of gradient color and myriad shade.
Now I live here, in a land where my life’s worth and that of black and brown bodies like mine must be proclaimed, shouted, and insisted upon.
Where others like me beg for the right to breathe.
There are days when my blackness feels unearned, undeserved.
When I stand in limbo, a dichotomy of the spaces I take up, in which I live, and the categories into which I fit.
But I was born to my blackness.
It will never leave me.
May I let it inform and transform me instead.
May it do the same for you.

– Melissa Snyder, written on 5/31/20