“I think for a long time, I was confused on how to be black or what it meant to be black especially as someone who lives here Berrien Springs, MI specifically. Even though it’s a very cultural [and] diverse place, the culture is centered around Caucasian values...
For a while I was nervous to embrace my blackness because, well number one, I felt like I wasn’t black enough to even be called black. Especially when I got to college...
People would joke and...be like, ‘Well you can’t really be black because you’re from Berrien Springs...’ Black people would say this to me.
It was difficult but something that I realized is that anything that I do as a person who is black is the black experience. That’s what it is. If I like to sit in the rain, if I like to climb mountains, if I do things that aren’t stereotypically black, whatever I do is the black experience.
That is something that I’m still learning and teaching myself even now. Just because I’m doing things that black people wouldn’t stereotypically do, doesn’t mean that my experience is any less valuable than the people who are doing what is ‘stereotypically’ black.
And so I think for me, being black and proud is just living my life and doing what I actually want to do and not what people who are stereotypically black believe that my life should be.”
— Victoria, Afro-Latina, 23
