I grew up in Southern California neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly white — white schools, white teachers, white curriculum. I remember visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where a cast of Auguste Rodin’s monumental sculpture of Balzac towered over me. My friends and I immersed ourselves in the works of white authors, and I can still recite vast sections of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and, if I squeeze my eyes real tight, the final luxurious paragraphs of “The Dead,” James Joyce’s masterful short story.

But I am black — African-American, if you will — and unambiguously of African heritage. Thanks to my father, the rhythms and melodies of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane flowed through our household during my childhood. Yet, as an adolescent, Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Who were favored by my friends and me. (My enthusiasm for bluesmen such as Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters was rooted in my rock ’n’ roll fandom.) In short, I felt only incidentally “black,” despite being harassed by the local police, who frequently stopped me as I walked home from school or rode my bike to the grocery store.