Skittles

Raised in the Bay, My Life Like Skittles

I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and my mother showed me that beauty can be found in everything — including races.

She didn’t have to give me a lecture. She lived it. In the Bay, you can’t help but live it. One block is Vietnamese pho. The next is Mexican panaderías. The next is a Black church, a Filipino community center, a Pride flag in the window of an old Italian deli. My mother taught me to see all of it, taste all of it, respect all of it. She taught me that different isn’t dangerous. Different is gorgeous.

I love diversity. Not just the Black race — because I am biracial and my whole life has been both/and, not either/or. My life is like a rainbow or like Skittles candy. You don’t pick one color and throw the rest away. You want the whole bag. The red, the green, the yellow, the purple. You want the mix because the mix is what makes it good.

Yesterday was beautiful. Seeing Juneteenth celebrated openly, joyfully, in Salem of all places — that mattered. Red food, music, kids running around with flags, elders telling stories. Freedom acknowledged. Freedom still in progress. It felt like the Bay had followed me to Oregon.

And it made me think about how things change. We used to have holidays like Columbus Day. Now it’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day. That’s not “erasing history.” That’s telling the truth about it. My mother taught me that beauty is in the truth, even when the truth is hard. Columbus didn’t discover a place that already had people in it. The people who were here deserve the day.

That’s what the Bay gave me: the ability to hold two things at once. I can love America and still say we got some things wrong. I can celebrate Juneteenth and still understand why someone’s Italian grandfather loved Columbus Day. I can be biracial and not have to choose a side. I can be 51 and still believe in unity the way the Bahá’ís do — that we are one human family.

Growing up there meant I never thought a room should look like just one thing. Boardrooms, classrooms, courtrooms — if everybody looks the same, somebody’s missing. I walked into the Eugene courthouse and saw generations of white faces on the wall. No Barack Obama. No Kamala Harris. My mother’s voice was in my head: “Beauty is in everything.” But I didn’t see us on that wall. So now I work to change it.

Diversity isn’t a buzzword for me. It’s breakfast. It’s the aunties who weren’t blood but still claimed me. It’s the Tagalog I heard at the corner store and the Cantonese from my neighbor and the Spanish from the kids I grew up with. It’s Juneteenth at the park and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October and Pride in June and Lunar New Year in February.

My mother showed me that if you look for beauty in every race, every culture, every person, you will find it. And if you live long enough, you become it.

My life is like Skittles. Taste the rainbow. I do, every day.

Thank you Diversity kids.