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ED AYERS: While putting this episode together we asked our listeners to share their own experiences of racial passing, including one from listener Johanna Lenner-Cusin in Berkeley, California.

JOHANNA LENNER-CUSIN: When people ask me about my race I generally identify as black, and that has been a growing process for me. In terms of code switching and the power of passing, I can’t dismiss that at all. The truth is, for me, being able to pass has been troubling at times. But it definitely is like with great power comes great responsibility. Like, I could always be white– almost.

My mother is white. My father is black. He is actually only half-black, though no one would notice that from looking at him.

One of the things I have struggled with is identifying as black, because I am aware that I do not share many experiences that darker skinned American black people experience. The reality is that if 80% to 90% of white people who see you do not perceive you as being black, you do have an advantage, potentially, obviously. I think there’s probably a lot of people, some of them potentially listening to this story, who will say that that’s wrong– that I should not, that I should always identify as a quarter black.

One of the reasons that I started identifying as black more frequently was because I also had a black friend and mentor of mine who basically yelled at me one day that I needed to stop qualifying my blackness because she was offended by that. So I thought, OK, that make sense to me, too.

I think by and large the big thing that categories do is that they limit the things that you can do, and they limit the ways that you can think. And they shape your actions in various kinds of ways. And so for me, for example, they shape what I tell people about my family and how I introduce that to them. And so I try to be as sensitive and aware of that as I can.

ED AYERS: Johanna Lenner-Cusin is a high school history teacher in Berkeley, California.