In the more than two years since Michael Brown was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Mo., and the city erupted in anger and unrest, increasing the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement, we have borne witness to the very best of who we are as black people in this country. The atrocities continue — the glaring police brutality, the staggeringly disproportionate numbers of black men in the prison system, the racial wage gap and any number of other disparities that come along with a nation founded upon enslavement of nonwhite people — but we galvanize our grief.

Our new president campaigned directly to those white people who are terrified by our resolve to not merely survive, but to represent America as something other than demoralized chattel. President Trump can try to reduce us to “the blacks” who are all relegated to life in the “inner cities,” which “are a disaster education-wise, job-wise, safety-wise, in every way possible,” but I suspect that’s because he knows he has already lost control of the narrative.

In the 1970s Warner, N.H., then a town with a population under 1,500, where census data indicates that I represented the black population in its entirety, I used to love watching “The Wiz.” I could look at Diana Ross as Dorothy, with her chic round Afro, brown skin and ruby slippers, and Michael Jackson, whimsical and fluid as the Scarecrow — the part I eventually got to play in my dance class production of the show — all day.

In middle school, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to my white classmates that even though I look black, I am actually biracial — my birth mother is white and my birth father is black — and so I wasn’t really as black as they thought. What’s more, my adolescent logic went, my adopted parents are white, so that should count for something, right? People were seldom interested. At best, I heard this: “We don’t even think of you as black anyway.”

It was a comment that, based on how I thought then, should have made me feel better than it did. After all, wasn’t that what I wanted? To be considered an equal? It took me a long time before I understood that being an equal in an exclusively white environment meant erasing and devaluing my blackness. As a young adult, though, I did come to realize that wholly embracing my blackness, not explaining it away to classmates or friends, comes with a mighty and magnificent sense of joy, which I hope will serve as a model for my son to keep doing the same.

So it’s profound to me that my light-skinned son, who identifies as both mixed and black, was upset when he started sixth grade last fall at a new school where his new racially diverse peer group expressed confusion about his background.