I am one tired woman and while I could list the amazing, unbelievable and slightly incredible things I’d had to deal with just today I fear I’d get tired all over again. After school today I had a consulting job an hour away, three hours of consulting, and then another hour drive home. Who’s tired besides me? Yeah, I’m feelin’ ya.

Your questions and comments and emails are astoundingly and generously kind. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say this: wow - some of y’all really DO use my personal email and, for some reason, I’m always shocked when you do, but in a happy way unless you’re telling me to shove off in which case might I suggest that little option you always have of not reading? But I really do love all the ones I have gotten lately, so send me your fax number and you’ll have a faxed pony and a yacht by the morning.

Enough of the love fest. I wouldn’t want readers to get the wrong idea.

Onto some of the questions and answers. If they don’t make sense, I’d like to remind you that I’m tired. Like, waking up daily at 3:30 a.m. and having my brain turn on kind of tired but I don’t want to leave you hanging.

From the email file, Beth asked How do you tell the difference between someone who does not care about your race and someone who does?

I really liked that question because I can see how it presents itself as a sort of litmus test for sensitivity for racial issues. You have to take this on a case-by-case basis. When there is a problem, do people point to a character flaw first? Do they suggest that someone is simply just an asshole? Or do they blame race for all those things? This has to be answered individually and it’s not always an easy process.

Ben says that he gets questions like, “Does it take a long time to braid her hair?”

Supposing there are a lot of braids, wouldn’t one guess that the answer is yes. I’m going to err on the side of curiosity here and suppose that the question has more to do with the HOW do you manage to get those braids done and is it worth the time? As a little girl I cried every single time I got braids but it was worth it not to have the trouble of doing it daily. Wrap in scarf at night, set to go! That opens up more conversation about the products and tools it takes to do the hair and I think that, like Wendy mentioned, it allows us to delve deeper into other topics. Hair can be a safe place to begin and used as a jumping off point.

My Aussie friend, Yvonne, asked why people are so afraid of offending others. Many of the comments actually sort of answered that question: people have gotten burned before and are trying hard to make sense of this mucky muck of race until we are afraid to even ask questions again. Part of this was experienced by Dana in her post because she wants to back off of political writings for another reason entirely, but the fear is there. It’s the same fearful response that we want to back away from, but I try to remember that there is a human being on the other side so if I put in the time to experience a relationship with them that fear begins to dissipate and we’re more likely to get somewhere.

Did I mention that I’m tired? Because when I look over this post I’m beginning to wonder if my answers are making sense.

The Caffeinated Librarian asks: Do we mean a culture or a skin color or are we talking about genetics…or some weird, constantly shifting version of all three?

It is my guess and opinion that the two of those three we mesh together in conversations tend to be about culture and skin color, but mostly we are talking about culture. But my answer would probably be the same as the previous one because, again, the human aspect of the people we’re talking about/with is forgotten.

Mrs. RW asks: When I am at a family gathering where older (and sometimes not-so-older) relatives make racial jokes or use terms that are derogatory to people of color, is it incumbant upon me to tell them what idiots/assholes/racist pigs they are to their face - or is thinking it just enough

This is the touchiest one because it’s so painful to think that our family members believe such hateful things that they’d let slip their nasty thoughts. It’s also painful to hear, “But my Granny grew up in a different time. Things were DIFFERENT back then.” May I just give an example of something I’ve used before as a response to that? I always like to point out that my grandmother on my mom’s side is White and she grew up in that same different time and she isn’t like that. When people say that it sounds like such an excuse, but it wasn’t everyone. My mom wasn’t the first person to marry a Black man and I can’t let that one slide. When my sisters and I told my dad that his aunt called us “half-breeds” and made us sit on the porch while all the other Black cousins watched tv in the air-conditioned house, he didn’t let her off the hook. It was the last we saw of her because he didn’t let her treat us that way.

Betsy and Kelliqua asked similar questions about the race boxes we check and the races to which we refer ourselves to.

Here’s how tired I am. I don’t care about ending that sentence with a preposition. I’m a writer! I’m creative! I’m e e cummings!

Let me tell another story. My mom, when giving birth to me and my sisters, was in a South Side Chicago hospital and the White nurse told her that there was no such thing as “mixed” and that she had to mark “White” on our birth certificates because my mother is White. Up until college I traded off which ones I checked and “Mixed Race” wasn’t even an option so one day, while at the admissions office, I stopped by to ask when that would be a choice.

“Just choose one or the other. We don’t have both.”

“Yes, I know, that’s my point. If I want to classify as both, why can’t I? Aren’t you smarter than the computer that spit this out? Can’t you make a new box?”

She wasn’t very amused by my questions and brushed me off so I asked if I were allowed to change my race whenever I wanted to and she said, “Sure. It’ll change every time you put in a request, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

When I walked out of the office that day I was Hispanic. The following semester I was Asian. I was every single box they offered until I graduated and that lady in the admissions office was SICK OF ME COMING IN but I was trying to make a point. The semester after I graduated a friend told me that “Mixed Race” was an option finally and I felt satisfied.

What I realized about how I was identifying, however, was that I felt ok with choosing. I also realized that so many people in our historic American heritage were classified as “Black” but had one White parent. Somehow, it gave me permission to say that I felt comfortable in my Black skin when so much of what I’d come up against was as Black. That’s not to say I haven’t felt the sting of “not Black enough” and boy, can I ever identify with Obama.

I can’t possibly tackle Please explain ebonics. Is is a real language? yet. Can I get a pass on that one until I get more sleep?

3:30 a.m. will be here soon enough.