I turn 56 in three days.

I have been trying to write something about what fifty-six years has taught me, and I keep getting stuck on the big arguments — the policies, the timelines, the things that have changed and the things that haven't. So I am going to do this instead. I am going to write about three times in my life that taught me what I know about race in America.

Hawaiʻi.

I grew up in Hawaiʻi in the 1970s. It was a melting pot in the actual sense of the phrase — not the marketing version. Everyone I knew was something. Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Black, haole, Korean, Samoan, mixed every which way. The kids on my street did not look like each other and we did not notice. Racism felt like a foreign concept to me as a child. I knew it existed somewhere — I had heard about the mainland — but it was the kind of thing that happened in other places, on television, in old photographs. It was not the air I breathed.

I want to be careful here, because nostalgia gets in the way of telling the truth. Hawaiʻi had its own things going on. The plantation history was right there. Hawaiian sovereignty conversations were just starting. The military was everywhere. None of it was a paradise. But for a kid like me, what I felt was a kind of permission to be whatever I was without anyone needing to name it.

Fallon, Nevada.

Then the Navy sent my dad to Fallon, and we went with him.

If you do not know it: Fallon is a small town in the high desert, two hours east of Reno, with a Naval Air Station and an awful lot of Mormons. I was the wrong kind of kid for that town from the moment I arrived. I had a Hawaiʻi accent, a different way of eating, and a different color of skin from almost everyone in my class.

A Mormon boy called me a burnt cookie one day. He told me it came from a Sunday school story they had — about how God baked people. The white kids, he said, came out of the oven just right. The brown kids — kids like me — had been left in too long. He was trying to be mean. The Sunday school story just gave him a way to do it.

I had never thought about my skin color before that day. I went home and looked at my arms in a way I had not before.

What I learned that year was that someone can take your sense of yourself apart in a sentence, because their idea of who you are got there first.

The summer of 1983.

The Navy brought us back to Hawaiʻi by then. I was thirteen.

That summer, three girls named Monique, Linal, and Shantel taught me the N-word. They said it among themselves in a way I had never heard a word said before. I tried to use it the way they did, the way kids do when they are trying to fit in, and one of them stopped me — gently, completely — and explained that the word was not for me.

That was the first conversation I ever had about race that I remember as a conversation, not as a moment of being hurt.

They did not have to do that. They were thirteen too. They could have laughed at me, or been done with me, or just let me say the wrong thing and watched what happened. Instead they told me. They taught me, on a summer afternoon in 1983, where the line was and how to find it. I have spent forty-three years trying to deserve that lesson.

Monique. Linal. Shantel. I am writing this down now because I owe it to you, and because I want my own kids and anyone else who reads this to know that the people who teach us how to be in the world are not always the people we paid for the lesson. Sometimes they were thirteen too.

I turn 56 in three days. This is some of what I have learned. There is so much more I have yet to learn.

— Michelle