Color My World

摘要

It was one of the toughest assignments of senior year—a 4,000-word argumentative essay on a controversial topic. Groans echoed down the halls of Denver's George Washington High School, but Nicole Caldwell was secretly pumped. All her life she had been required to categorize herself by race. Sometimes the ivory-skinned, green-eyed teen checked black. Sometimes she checked black and white, the races of her father and mother. Occasionally, when she was feeling defiant, she checked simply "other." None of the choices felt quite right. This was Caldwell's chance to speak up. Race is a divisive tool of "outdated institutions," concluded the outspoken 18-year-old on page 12 of her polemic against race politics. It "doesn't really even exist anymore."