"You sound white."

"You sound white."

Any black person would agree, this is an annoying and ignorant statement.

I went home last week and this is what happened.

It was Super Bowl Sunday and I went to my mom's house. It was my sister, her friend, my child hood friend, my cousin, my aunt, my mom, myself, and my recently incarcerated uncle– we'll come back to him later...

My sister, her friend, mine, and I start playing Upwards, a scrabble game that you can stack and create words on top of one another. We start chopping it up and when I chimed it was like the longest pauses followed right after.

For example, my sister said something on the lines of how old the game was (and we literally have had this game in the house since birth), her friend responded like "Yeah, I see!" We all laughed and then here I come, corny Erianna, and said something like "Ha! Yeah as old as Uncle Tony!!" PAAAAAAAUSE, no laugh or nothing. I mean it was true! My Unlce Tony is old as hell!

But whatever. It's not that funny.

Moments like this kept reoccurring. Then my childhood friend goes "Eri, you sound white!"

Everybody laughs but knowing deep down they hate being called that themselves.

And I'm just like:

But do I? Have I changed? These are the thoughts that started to consume my mind.

THEN this is where Uncle Tony comes in.

I recently made a Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbETrPdfJNI) and in that video, I talked about the realities of being black on a predominately white campus.

I show my mom, sister, aunt– and Uncle Tony decides to sit across the living room. Unbeknownst to me he was listening.

After the video, my family pats me on my back and tells me how they liked it. We start having a conversation about it.

Tony chimes in. Mind you, from across the room, and goes "why do you feel like that?"

Which is a valid question BUT let me just give you a little background on him. My uncle has probably been in jail since I was 14/15/16 years old, I'm almost 21now. I'm not going to tell you his crime but as you can infer, he has been in prison for a good minute and I don't think anyone would come out right even after a week. However, he has been a little "different" if I'm being "Minnesota nice", my whole life. Now if I was an outsider I would describe him as being completely nutty but because I'm his niece, we'll just stick with "different." Overall, his behaviors and social skills have turned into being very aggressive, hostile, and he must be the center of attention, especially in conversations!

So when he posed the question "why do [I] feel like that?" everybody was just like here we go...

I go, "Well, how would you feel if you were the only black person in an all white prison?"

And as you can tell, I only said it this way so 1. He wouldn't have to answer me back and 2. This was probably the only way he was going to understand me anyways.

And man, I should've just kept my mouth shut or let someone else explain to him because he flipped out on me! He went on a rant saying and I was using "reverse psychology" on him and some other stuff that just went through one hear and out the other.

THEN I got stuck in Minnesota for an extra week but– that's a different story.

But your family is usually this group of people you can go back to and be yourself. This time it didn't happen for me. I left feeling like an outsider but more than that, I felt like I may have changed.

And that's fine, I'm still coming into myself but dang! Even my own family or long time friends see me differently now, hear me differently now. Immediately after I left I felt butt hurt about it. Then I had the realization that that's okay. And I don't SOUND WHITE. I sound like me and this is who I am.

College is a weird time in your life, on and off campus.

Thanks for reading,

E