Sometimes as I try to raise these children up to love themselves and love others even I still loathe myself in my coffee-brown skin and frizzy hair and flatter nose and at the grocery store which is where I go weekly to get what lies beyond the cocoon of my home and I am muttering something to myself as I walk through the pasta aisle when I spot a middle-aged white man and I make eye contact with him or try but he averts his eyes from me and I realize that while a white man talking to himself in this town is a tech genius in this white man’s eyes I am likely homeless or crazy in my ripped Harvard Law School T-shirt I must have gotten from Goodwill and when I get to the checkout lane I try to perform the part of a white person so they don’t ask me for ID just like they didn’t ask the white person in front of me for ID and I think no one has loathed themselves like I loathe myself and I am ashamed to admit this even to myself or into the air I exhale or to the other brown-skinned people but when I dare to tell it to the brown people for the first time in my life at forty-five after the murder of Trayvon and the acquittal of Zimmerman they look at me and their eyes well with tears and their soul reaches out to touch mine with an invisible hand and for the first time I realize I am not alone when I loathe myself as a Black person. Have never been alone.