My battle with stereotyping

The issue of stereotyping is one that is very close to me because it is something that I struggled with early on in life. For a young black man who's parents were middle class I constantly battled the question of who I was and what it meant to be black. I had all kinds of friends from the white kids I went to school with (my senior year I was the only black person in my high school) to the black kids in my neighborhood and who I played ball with. Both groups had their own idea of what a black person was. Since I played ball it allowed me a link with most of my black friends because even though our fathers had grown up together we were essentially from different backgrounds, the fact that I was an athlete granted me passage in a circle that was hard to crack if you weren't from that background. Because of that I was always looked upon by my black friends as an Oreo because of how I spoke and where I went to school. They saw themselves as the disenfranchised black youth typically personified in the rap music videos of the day. Since they came from a similar background of the people in those situation I chose to accept the views because they seemed real. So that became my idea of what a black man was. The white kids saw me as the Sydney Poirtier type described in the reading by Jack Nachbar, I was a good athlete, well spoken and reasonably intelligent. My inability to discern between the two added to my difficulty with the subject growing up. What I had to realize is what eventually everyone must realize, that even though there are people who personify certain aspects of a race or an idea of a race or group of people, ultimately the individuals themselves must decide their own fate and be who they want to be. It was easy for me to play roles when I was around certain people because that was what they expected, but in order to stay true to myself I had to decide what was best for me and not allow a stereotype to define me as a person.