This morning I was going through memorabilia and found my elementary school 6th grade class photo. I don’t recall much from that year except that my teacher had a cool name – Mrs. Partridge, and that I was one of three students of color in my class of twenty-five kids.

We didn’t use that term in the 1970′s and frankly didn’t think of myself as being particularly different. What bothered me more was that I felt like a giant compared to the other Chinese-American girl. Add to it she became a cheerleader in high school, which made it even worse. I just didn’t feel like I fit in due to my size (the “fat” kid) and that I wasn’t Jewish.

Still, I wonder what my teacher and the other kids thought of me because I was ethnically and racially different. I don’t recall any  special mention of different cultures in class assignments. Maybe it didn’t matter yet we were only 10 years out from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and one year away from the end of the Vietnam War. Tumultuous times indeed.

As I continued looking at the photo, I saw the one African-American student in my class. All I remember is how she invited me to her birthday party and how much fun I had. I didn’t even know why she invited me as I don’t remember spending much time with her in or out of class. I wonder even more what it must have felt for her to be the “only one,” which reminded me of what W.E.B. DuBois wrote about “double-consciousness” in his book, The Souls of Black Folk.

He wrote in 1903, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”