Quinn - When Did Race Start For Me?

I pretty much didn’t know what race was until I was in fourth grade. I had to be taught what it was by my teachers. I mean, I always had a sense that I was half Chinese and half white, but that didn’t serve as any kind of distinction from my peers, and there were no stereotypes attached to that as far as I could tell. My old school was an environment kinda like Andover, where there wasn’t any blatant expression of racism from anyone, even if tensions did lurk beneath the surface— and as a little kid growing up in this, my powers of perception hadn’t developed enough to see anything in nuance or detail. Everything was in broad strokes, and in the case of identity, the broad stroke was that we were all just human. I remember my best friend at the time, a black kid named Alex, once told me when we were playing Super Smash Bros. in his basement that he had learned a word that was so intensely bad, that most people couldn’t say it out loud. He said he could, though. That was a revelation to me— there were words that some people could say and others couldn’t? How did that work? What reasoning did they have for something like that? When I went back home, my parents tried to explain as best they could to fourth-grade-Quinn, but I’m pretty sure that they weren’t all too successful. Besides that, I can’t think of one defining moment that encapsulates the discovery of my racial identity. Especially as something that I talk about a lot (hell, I’m in MOSAIC, which is an affinity group entirely centered around being mixed race) it’s surprising that I can’t remember much more than this. As far as I can tell, I went from that kind of innocence to doing identity projects and writing papers on my heritage in around three years. Was that transition just the final unearthing of what had been fed into me subconsciously for years? Or were there memories in there that developed my understanding of race that I just don’t quite remember?