When a friend I have known for half my life accused me recently of behaving like my birthmother during one of our ongoing discussions about race in America, I panicked. Like many adults in the throes of raising a family, just trying to get everything right, I live in fear of becoming my parents – specifically, of becoming my birthmother, and being the kind of person who will hold someone emotionally hostage and demand a ransom of total deference.  I met her when I was 11, and I loved her immediately. She was wry and brilliant and charismatic, and there remain many things one can admire about her. Even her mastery of punch-packing repartee is not without merit, except when it’s used as a weapon.  Related: Facing my fear: I watched too many friends die of Aids. Then I was diagnosed | Trevor Martin  As a teenager, when I was in my birthmother’s company and received praise or awards or special treatment from adults for being what they deemed precocious, she was always quick to remind me: “Your packaging misrepresents your substance.” Which was to say, I may look cute and sound smart, but I was, in fact, neither of those things.  The first couple of times she said this, it seemed like a kind of insightful quick-take. A lesson on the perils of unsolicited exotification in the all-white town where I grew up. It was something I could use, borrow even, to grow and be a more interesting person. But it very quickly began to have a different effect, and it took me decades to convince myself that I was not actually a fraud.  My birthmother’s carefully crafted barbs were counterbalanced by my profound, almost debilitating, desire to be near her. I had fallen for the romance of a perfectly imagined mother-daughter bond. But the comment that altered our relationship forever was when my birthmother told me that because she had given birth to me, I could not identify myself as black. (My adopted family is white. My birthmother is white, and my birthfather is black.)  Her intention was not merely to erase me, but to erase my blackness – and perhaps worse, to make clear that if I wanted her to consider me as her daughter, it would require that I value my whiteness above my blackness. As a black woman, this hit especially deep, since our erasure is so pervasive in both historical and contemporary America.  When my friend accused me of being overly judgmental, my response reeked of my birthmother’s attacks on my character  So when my friend, who is white, accused me years later of being overly judgmental in regard to her white privilege, my response was swift and yes, it reeked of my birthmother’s relentlessly self-serving attacks on my character.  I leveled all of my anger and resentment over the ubiquity of white privilege and systemic racism solely at my friend, even as I knew that she would not be able to give me the answer I wanted – that the playing field is far from level, the system is rigged, black people are dying and that white people, starting with her, need to stand up and vow to spend as much of their time thinking about this reality as black people do feeling its impact.  The truth is, in this particular friendship, I have long felt unsettled by what I see as my friend’s inability to reconcile her white privilege with my blackness. There were numerous incidents that occurred when we were in college that, in hindsight, had clear racial implications, but that I didn’t confront at the time because all I could hear in my head was that white friend from high school who said to me: “Why is it always about race for you?”  While I believe that any and every black person in America is entitled to be the authority on race as he or she or they experience it, there is, of course, also a need to remember that people respond to love, not persecution. I’d like to believe that however traumatic, I learned this lesson most pointedly from my birthmother, who effectively taught me how to push through one of my biggest fears – being as intensely judgmental as she is. In the process, I failed my friend. I’m sorry about that. But now, having faced down that bitter legacy, I won’t make that mistake again.  Open contributions: When have you faced your fear?
She demanded deference and fidelity to her prejudiced ideas in exchange for her love. I was horrified when I transferred that self-serving anger on to a friend