“I remember the very day that I became colored.”

You read these revolutionary words by Zora Neale-Hurston written in her 1928 essay entitled “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” and you simply cannot believe how an African-American woman in the 1920s completed such a strange, yet marvelous transformation.

Questions after questions start to swirl around in your head. You begin to wonder if there were no mirrors in her house. How has she never seen her reflection before? How can one not realize their own race? You find yourself making the assumption that one’s race is evident from their skin color.

Since realizing this assumption and knowing that race is a social construct, you turn to wondering about her interactions with white people around her. Did the white people not bother to comment on her visible otherness? It seems unlikely that they would have overlooked an opportunity to satisfy their ‘chain of being.’

And yet, you are even more shocked that in 2016 these words resonate with you in a way that leaves you feeling as if you have been gifted a second sight. This second sight echoes the feeling of double-consciousness. As DuBois said in The Souls of Black Folk, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

For what seems like the first time in a while, your race is constantly on your mind. The scales from your eyes have been removed and your race becomes hyper-visible in everything you do. It is evident everywhere around you. In every conversation. Every look. Every touch. Every legislation. Every policy. Every passing comment. Every “I can’t wait to get these fucking people out of this country.”

You begin to realize that the system you have been living for all of your life explicitly declared that your life does not matter as much as your white counterparts. And the racist, privileged white folk? They couldn’t be happier for this declaration. They think it’s time to break out every racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, able-bodied thing they have been saving for decades.

Damn, it must be nice to have that white privilege, you think. You cannot remember if you saw that particular brand of premium privilege in the Wegman’s over on Henrietta the last time you were there. You think to yourself that maybe they were all out by the time you entered the store. When in reality, that privilege can never be bought by you.

You wake up still struggling with understanding that in the matter of hours following the 2016 Presidential Election, your body feels tired. The hatred Donald Trump has left in his wake leaves you feeling tired. You are tired of explaining to people too caught up in their white privilege that despite their good intentions, you still do not feel safe. You are tired of them telling you that you are overreacting because your oppression is not felt by them.

But most importantly, you are tired of carrying the memory captured in the very fabric of your skin. You remember reading Claudia Rankine’s statement in Citizen that “the body has memory…[it] hauls more than its weight” (2014, 28). In a weird way, this one quote perfectly captures the tiredness you feel. You feel as if your body has become the site of an ancient suffering. Everything that has ever been felt by someone like you is added as another layer to the already heavy load on your back.

Stuck in your body, you feel your coloredness being written onto you every time you pass a white man on the Eastman Quad. You see them seeing you without really knowing who you are. On that particular day and every day since, your self-identification struggles against the tide of the social understanding of your race. You remember the day that you first felt colored because it is a day that you will never forget.