"I do think it's troublesome when someone who is of mixed race chooses to deny that part of them that was oppressed," she says.

Here and abroad

Charles Benjamin Cloud, 63, remembers a time when he was angry at all white people. That was in the time of the white water fountain and the black water fountain.

"They had their side of town; we had ours," he says of his childhood in New Bern, North Carolina.

As the son of a Cherokee man and a part-Cherokee, part-black woman, Cloud could have passed for something other than black.

"If I had decided to tell everyone I was Puerto Rican or Mexican, people probably wouldn't have known a difference," he says.

But he didn't.

"I never wanted to identify as white," he says.

"Blackness is a state of mind more so than a physical experience. But back then, physical appearance was much more of a black identity than it is now."

Cloud joined the Air Force and traveled the world. His light, ruddy complexion threw people off. The Turks thought he was Turkish; the Iranians thought he was from Iran. He even passed for Greek.

But back home, he chose not just to be American. He was black.

Losing color

What happens when you lose your color as is Sembene McFarland, a 35-year-old emergency room nurse in Newark, New Jersey?

She has a condition known as vitiligo and is losing the pigmentation of her skin. The disorder affects people of all races but is most prominent in those with darker complexions.

McFarland describes herself as "garden-variety black" but once her vitiligo became noticeable, she found herself the target of outlandish comments.

When McFarland was working at a cash register job at a Barnes and Noble, a customer told her, "If you got rid of the rest of the color, you would be a really pretty Asian girl."

"Thank you very much," McFarland told the woman. "Have a nice day."

Now, she can't relay the story without laughing out loud.

Others have wondered: Were you white first or black first?

"That blew my mind," she says.

Her skin condition shows how people think of being black so literally, she says.

"When I think black, I don't think a particular shade," she says.

McFarland was 16 when she first learned she had vitiligo. It was tough. At that young age, no one wants to stand out.

Later she laughed. In high school in Mississippi, her classmates always joked she wanted to be white. She spoke like a white person. Some people said she sat like a white person - all proper.

Now here she was, turning white.