My father wasn’t wrong. At 13 years old, I had already had numerous encounters related to the darkness of my skin.

Like the winter of second grade, when I was playing on a patch of ice before the first bell rang at my school in Utah, where I grew up. I slid my feet on the ground, pretending I was a professional ice skater. A few minutes in, an older boy came over and pushed me off the ice. He scowled at me and yelled, “Get off the ice!” punctuating his command with the racial slur my father had warned me of. I just sat there.

Or later in elementary school when we learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My teacher told us how back then black people couldn’t drink at the same water fountains as white people, and I sat in agony as all of my white-skinned peers peeked over the tops of their textbooks looking at me — the only black kid in a sea of white. Later, as we left to go out to recess, I stopped at the water fountain to get a drink, and then watched the white girl after me used her sleeve to wipe the fountain before taking a drink herself.

My father’s words have come to me often, and I’ve realized how profound they were.

They came to me when I was 16 and joy riding around town with my white best friend and our two black guy friends. The officer who pulled us over made only the black kids put our hands on the dashboard, telling us we better not move them. My arms trembled from adrenaline, and from holding my arms straight out in front of me for 20 minutes. I was afraid of what would happen if any of us decided to put them down.

They came to me last March, when I was having beers with friends at a local bar in San Francisco, where I now live . After the white bouncer picked on my friend for accidentally bumping him on her way out, I stuck up for her, and he replied, “Oh I’m sorry, what do you want me to say? ‘Yessa massa’?” The bar refused to fire the guy.

My cousin Brandon, who’s from Oklahoma, got the talk from his sister when he was 15. He remembered it the time a bouncer at a club refused to let him in because he was wearing Vans, although his white friends who were let into the club a few minutes before him were wearing the same shoes.