Black Adjacent

With the pandemic still going and the civil unrest, I decided to write about my experience of being Michael's spouse for thirty-two years. Or what I call, "Black Adjacent."

No one told me to fall in love with a black man. Much less one that was a six foot former altar boy. Though if I look back, I came by it honestly. My father used to get in trouble when he would go to the movie theater in lower, slower Delaware as a boy because he wanted to sit in the balcony with his black friends. The owner of the theater would yell at him and threaten to call his mother if he didn’t get back downstairs where the white folks were supposed to sit. And even though my father’s childhood view was inclusive, most of his family would be overheard saying things like, “Why, you wouldn’t even treat a colored person that way.” It seemed harmless to us as kids. But now, when we’re all confronting our own racism, looking back on our own actions, what we saw and heard growing up, I don’t think we didn’t know it wasn’t right to say such things. Or did we?

Interested in reading more? Go to the full article here and please clap!: medium.com/@scottrosenzweig/black-adjacent-cf88857eebc4