Third Culture Kids - Matter Out of Place

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“You haven’t heard of ‘Don’t bro me before you know me?’” This was the catalytic comment that clinched my decision on the one issue out of the five I would pursue. Really a combination of my own desire to examine my own distress at the hypersensitivity to race in North America, but also to explore and justify this unease from the perspective of a Third Culture Kid who did not pay attention to skin color until I arrived for my undergraduate degree in Michigan. What the comment really sparked was a confusion, sadness, and a little bit of anger, that my own passport country, made strong by the diversity of its population, continues thinking that empowerment of ethnic minorities (I still find the term race in this context distasteful) is best done by drawing clear divisions between them. Reflecting further on the sum of my life experiences, particularly with my most recent 4 years in East Africa and exploring as much as I could of that continent, I realized why the comment tore at the fabric of my soul. In all of the countries I visited, no matter what language it was, especially when I became comfortable in the language, my race (what is simply skin color everywhere I’ve traveled outside of the USA) was never the first word addressed to me...more often than not it was brother. Likewise, the expected response was in kind, as a sibling - if we were of similar age - or as an uncle or nephew - depending on the age difference of the addressee. The idea that, as a seemingly white man (we are all so much more than our skin belies), I could not address other males of the same age (but that looked different than me) as bro or brother in a place as diverse as the USA, is ludicrous to me. However, as I began to play with how to approach this issue, I realized that perhaps it was really just because my accent and appearance were so American. The person that explained the

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