My sister and I have both had friends tell us we have no culture/ethnicity, we're just white - my sister was told by a girl who is mixed Chinese and German, I was told by a woman who is Puerto Rican. We were both kind of baffled by this because of how strongly we identified with our Ukrainian/Russian/Slovak background. We spent about half of our childhood weekends going to our grandmother's Ukrainian Orthodox church, we celebrated Orthodox Easter and Christmas, and we learned a bunch of different Eastern European food traditions. But because of our skin color, we were told that we were wrong.

My mom is the youngest of five, and her older siblings are all in their 70s now. A few years ago, my aunt and uncle were talking about what it was like to have an ethnic Ukrainian surname when they were in elementary school and junior high during the Cold War. My uncle had tears in his eyes when he talked about how his best friends stopped being allowed to play with him because "What if the [surname] family is Russian spies?" There was a 25-year period where my grandmother had no contact with her cousins in "the old country" because it was too risky to have letters going back and forth too often.

It strikes me as really sad that we've gotten to the point where people of certain skin colors aren't supposed to take interest in their ancestry and ethnic heritage.