Labels
I am a black Hispanic LGBQ transgendered
Native American male who looks like a
conventional white guy but that’s only because
you see what I appear to be and not a jigsaw
puzzle with bent and broken pieces that if
dropped in a therapist’s office would scatter
its social construction and fall into a multicultural
mélange that emerged about 200,000 years ago in
East Africa and spread through Eurasia, Oceania,
and the Americas, feeding and interbreeding,
speaking thousands of different languages,
framing the world in ways Charles Darwin and
Walt Whitman would say are unique and complex
and not easily captured on US Census forms
where one must check off racial groups that don’t
exist in nature.
—Martin H. Levinson
This article appears in November 2016.
