Moving from school to school was a challenge. I never knew what to expect. The current trend at one school was considered lame at the next, and it was always a struggle making new friends. I grew up in a predominately African-American community, which influenced me in so many ways. When I was around 7 years old, I already started to pick up the ratchet slang thrown around at my school, and for some reason it made my parents proud of me. They wanted their daughter to be a “Black Queen” to “appreciate her roots” and to “act black.” At such a young age, I didn’t understand what was wrong with any of it.

That is, until I was 11. I recently started attending Inman Middle School, and if I’m being completely honest, it changed my life. I was still young and very impressionable, so it was natural for me to begin to act like the other kids acted, talk like the other kids talked, and listen to the same music as the other kids did.

Instead of going over to my aunt’s house every weekend and kicking my feet up, jamming to old school music, I decided to play Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and One Direction and dance around my aunt’s living room like the carefree child I was instead. My aunt, along with other family members decided to tease me by saying, “Oh so you listen to white people music now,” and for quite some time, it was just a joke. Well, until quite some time became a longer while, and that while is still continuing today.

I get comments on how I “talk white” or “act white,” and it makes me extremely angry because it mostly comes from my own family. For a while, it made me insecure, and to some extent it still does.

Fast forward to my first year in high school. I have at least three groups of friends in which some individuals overlap in others. Here is where everything begins to change. To my black group of friends, I’m the whitest person they know, and to my white group of friends, I’m the blackest person they know.

Constantly caught in the middle of a cold war between races, I wasn’t too sure who I was siding with. And that makes me very angry.

Why do I have to pick sides? Why is the color of my skin only valid if I listen to trap music and become the “loud angry black woman” stereotype? Why can’t I just exist without being labeled by the people I’m supposed to hold dear to my heart?

And then my statement: You can’t act a color.

I can’t “talk like a white person.” I can’t “act like a white girl.” And I absolutely refuse to force myself into a small box labeled “black” or “white” because I already know what I am.

I am valid.

I don’t have to listen to music solely by black people to “appreciate my roots.” I don’t have to eliminate all slang from my dialect to not be labeled as “ghetto,” and I sure as hell don’t have to be nice all of the time so people won’t see me as an “angry black woman.”

So, this is a message to all of the family and friends who alienated someone close to them because they acted a certain way: Stop it. You’re making a huge mistake that could lower someone’s self-esteem severely. Sure, I fought back against society’s “norm,” but other people won’t. Other people can’t.

So it’s up to you not to be ignorant, and treat everyone with respect not because of their race, but because they are human.

Noelle is a 9th grader at Grady High School.

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More of a slam poet? Join VOX and Atlanta Word Works at one of these upcoming events:

PADV Teen Summit – Sat. March 3, free, at Decatur High School. Register online here.

High Museum Teen Night – Friday March 9, at the High Museum. Open Mics and 6:45 and 7:45 p.m. Details online at high.org/event/teen-night/.

Art Not Ego Youth Poetry Slam – hosted by VOX’s Atlanta Word Works! Sat., March 17, 1 p.m. Register free online at bit.ly/artnotego2018.