Growing up as a minority Latino in the streets of Brooklyn, and attending City College of New York (Poor Man’s Harvard) in 1989 in Harlem I decided I would take a university course on African American studies. Many would not know that I had suffered from an identity crisis that made me believe I was a lite skin Jamaican who would go all night carousing dancing like Bob Marley, and well the rest should not be said......
When entering the classroom it never had accord to me that I was the only lite skin Dominican who was in a room full of every shade of black beauty. Even the professor was dressed in Nigerian garments from the motherland - whose name I couldn’t spell for the life of me.
As the professor took turns around the room asking everyone to share a little about themselves, and why they were taking his course. I could notice that not one person had set their eyes on the obvious. Eventually, the professor stopped the class and asked that I stand up and give an account as to why I was taking “his” class. And, to his surprise, I looked around noticing everyone’s eyes on me and I smiled, and said: “because I got soul”. And, the entire class including the professor laughed at my candid humor and said brother “sit back down”!
The moral of the story, you don’t have to be dark skin to have soul!
Let’s bag it up...
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