From personal experience I can tell you that it is tiring being Black in America, physically, mentally and emotionally.

Being Black in this country compelled me to realize that race, a socially constructed concept, plays an important role in the lives of many people. At Berkeley, no one was colorblind. My peers and professors always noted my race and I also took notice of theirs. In general, the people of color on campus filled the jobs of services workers and manual laborers, while the white employees had most of the administrative jobs. In each of my classes and at my campus job, I was the only one or one of the few Blacks. This trend worsened while I was in law school. These social conditions, along with many others, have had a profound impact on my education and my identity.

I don’t have the answer to how I “made it” when the life patterns of many young black men show that it is evident that there is a huge pool of poorly educated black men that are becoming more disconnected from the mainstream society than ever before. For black men in this country’s inner cities finishing high school is the exception, professional work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine.

I am the first of two children raised by a single mother in a poor family in the Bay Area. Since my younger sister and I are the only siblings, we were very close. My mom has worked hard in retail her whole life, but regardless, her wages were not always enough to provide for the family, and our father never helped us out. We certainly did need government assistance but we never received it. Every month we would come up short when it was time to buy food, put clothes on our back, and pay the bills.

Besides each of the apartments we lived in being small, rent in the Bay Area was extremely high. We all shared one room and when times got rough, tensions rose. Our apartment was in poor condition and the landlord would often make excuses for why he could not fix one problem or another. I will never forget the broken toilets and refrigerators that forced us to live in inhumane conditions. Every couple of years we moved in search of cheaper rent or when we fell behind in our payments.

My life experiences and hard work, despite the odds against me, in addition to the help and support of various people, allowed me to escape a life of oppression and into Berkeley. At the university, I was able to focus more on my studies because of scholarships and from the money I saved working. I succeeded at Berkeley beyond my wildest dreams and recently graduated from law school. Without the educational opportunities that I received I would have been trapped by conditions that I had no control over.

I realize that being black sets me apart; I am American but still Black. I have figured out that my racial category has given me a history of accumulated disadvantages in obtaining educational, social, and economic opportunities in the United States. In the past, and in many instances today, Blacks could not live in the same neighborhoods as Whites, vote, or attend superior schools.

No matter how successful I am in the future, I will forever be Black, a black man and a black lawyer. Being Black is not the problem; I am filled with racial and cultural pride. However, when much of society uses the term black, it is stigmatized, in a racist manner, as a negative indicator of my personhood and all my hard earned accomplishments.

We all must be dedicated to improving the health, education, social, political and economic status of persons who are discriminated against based on race and/or ethnicity.