But when I am in high school and my mother starts to make more money, we travel to Jamaica, Mexico, Bali. We go as tourists, but because my mother is an artist and makes an effort to meet other artists everywhere we go, and because we are people of color who take the time to learn as much as we can about the culture we are visiting, and because we treat the people we meet as if they are human beings and not objects there solely to respond to our every whim, we are embraced by people, taken in like family.

In these places where many of the people have skin the same color as mine and where I am not embroiled in the indigenous racial politics of the day, I get a glimpse of a kind of freedom I have not experienced at home, where I always seem to be waiting for a bomb to drop and where I feel I am always being reminded of the significance, for better or worse, of my racial inheritance. In the race-obsessed United States, my color difines me, tells a story I have not written. In countries of color I feel that I am defined by my interactions with people. [...]"

Rebecca Walker in Black, White and Jewish