Thanks for your thoughtful insights. Oddly, I wrote this piece while waiting for my ancestry test results. When I got them back, I found out I was 8 percent non-Caucasian and about 4 percent black. What? I don't think my father knew, he told me stories from his father about Spanish-French ancestry. Turns out that was just a cover and as my grandfather moved from New Orleans to New York City, he repeated that story and dropped the black ancestry past and racially and legally charged implications that would have followed him.