“I wish I was black.”

I was probably 12 years old or so when I said this, and I was 100% sincere. In that moment, looking out the window as the rural landscape of western New York flew past, barely undulating and never ending, I couldn’t have been more sincere.

My life was basketball and I was a Piston’s fan. Isaiah Thomas was my all time favorite player. Michael Jackson’s ‘Off the Wall’ was my first record. And I mean vinyl. Might have been my last as well. Tapes were on their way.

All the guys I watched on the playgrounds and at the college, whose games I emulated and whose styles I mimicked, were all black guys. I was into early rap through my older brothers. We had cardboard taped to the floor in the basement and we spent hours a day working on all the moves we could remember from ‘Breakin.’ I’m not sure I could ever windmill, but I could do everything else. I was a badass little pop and locker.

I remember someone getting a hold of a tape of Eddie Murphy’s ‘Delirious’ and hearing it and thinking I’d just heard the coolest and damn near funniest thing ever. ‘Gooney goo goo’ had me rolling, and for the life of me now, I can’t remember what the joke was to that punchline. Whatever, his stories were so clearly real and it felt like a sneak peak into a life that I was fascinated by. A life I could only imagine. A life I couldn’t stop imagining.

The appeal was made only stronger by the sense that they were fighting a battle I couldn’t really fight. My team, the one I was on not by choice, was the opposition. The ‘man,’ and I didn’t want to be ‘the man.’ I wanted to be cool.

Black people, to me at 12, were cool. I can’t remember which comedian I heard more recently who said, and I’m most certainly paraphrasing here, “God knew that black people would have to endure countless and endless suffering and to make up for it he gave us a lifetime supply of ‘cool.'” It’s kind of a joke and kind of a sad statement of the reality of what a lot of people have to face and how a certain number choose to counter the reality that won’t seem to change for the better without changing doubly for the worse at times. But at 12, for me, it wasn’t so nuanced.

Beyond that I had a couple of role models in the house, older brothers who were the guys I looked up to most. I had two other brothers, actual brothers of mine, born of the same parents and all, and I looked up to them like crazy, but for some reason, perhaps my aforementioned affinities, I was drawn to my brothers who were ‘brothers.’

Eventually, after processing what I’d said, my father replied to my non-sequitur calmly and wisely.

“You probably shouldn’t tell anyone that. It’s okay for you to feel that, for now, but you should probably keep that to yourself.”

“Why?” I asked.

To my mind it could only be taken as an honor, right? I mean, I was saying I envied blackness. How could that be wrong?

A thousand ways. Trust me, it didn’t take long for me to see that after enunciating my most sincere wish.

“Well…” My dad thought. How do you tell your 12-year-old that they are being so ignorant of life’s realities in a moment when they are trying, sincerely, to understand people different from them.

“I don’t think you are thinking about this, but it could come off to some people like you are not really appreciating all that you have been given. Might seem a little unaware of all that black people have had to go through,” my dad said.

My dad’s not a ‘race’ guy. The issues confronting his own ‘kids’ would be dealt with when they would come up, but it was largely not a thing he thought about. He’s often surprised by how much I will think about race and the unfairness I’ve seen as I’ve grown up and watched. I’ll remind him, it would be hard for him to have my perspective; he didn’t really grow up in an environment like the one I did. He didn’t grow up in an integrated home within a largely homogeneously white community. He didn’t see all the dads who’d go out of their way to drop the ‘n-word’ in front of me, just to, I don’t know, check if I was cool with it? Remind me that they thought my brothers less for it? Just to shock me? Maybe they were like that all the time, I don’t know, but from my house, growing up, it was the single most hateful sounding word ever. When I was a kid, it was just barely starting to be re-appropriated by black culture and these grown men weren’t aware of that. It was the ugliest of usages of the ugliest word.

That day my dad stopped me cold. For him, he was just responding to a sensitive issue, trying to steer me clear of saying something so wrong, but what he did was get me thinking. I knew instantly what he meant and it started me on a train of thought that has been a thread through my life. It didn’t change my heart in that moment, but it changed my head. Eventually, my heart caught up and I came to understand how truly wrong my wish was.

I’m still learning to understand my great good fortune. I’m so thankful I said that to my dad. So thankful that he answered the way he did. Through the years and phases of my life, I’ve seen how it’s made me see things, things that are now so obvious to me that are so hidden from so many white men. About how much is taken for granted.

When I was in high school and we were all sitting in suburban living rooms drinking forties of O.E. with our shoes off and watching Boys in the Hood and playing out fantasies that were others’ nightmares, I knew the privilege. When we aped the style and patois of emerging disaffected young men whom society rejected before they even arrived, we were drowning in entitlement and dismissing and glorifying that which was exotic to us young men who would never have to face it. I recognized it, many of us did, for what it was not long after.

When I was in college and heard truly vile hate speech being bandied about by the future executives of the world, I was disgusted. The truth was there weren’t too many of them that did it — it was the tolerating of it all and the occasional sick, deep indulgence of it all. I remember my mother, sitting at our kitchen table on a summer evening when I was home from school after my sophomore year, telling me to love the people I loved for their good qualities and stick around to try to influence them positively when it came to the ugly parts. I don’t know. I didn’t really do that all that well there. Made some friends, but I still have a lot of bitterness, too.

What I know is that ‘wishing I was black,’ while sincere, was a privilege. It was a child’s understanding, and I hope it came from a place of empathy and a desire to connect with and understand other people and their experiences. But it was definitely a privilege.

The reality is that if a 12 or 15 or 28 or 45-year-old black person were to ‘wish they were white,’ it likely wouldn’t be from the same place of privilege as my wish came from. It likely wouldn’t be naive. In fact, I suspect it would come from a place of far deeper understanding than I may ever know.

This post was originally posted on Joe Medler’s Facebook page.