Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

On my first day of school in Mississippi, a boy pinned me to the ground and made me eat dirt. I was a California kid dropped into the Deep South in the 1980s and learned quickly that I didn’t belong. That moment set the tone for the rest of my years there.

My family was multiracial. My sister had been adopted from Korea. Back home, that didn’t raise eyebrows. In Mississippi, people would ask where we “got” her, as if she were something that came with a label. I saw people living in tarpaper shacks just down the road from our home in Madison.

Even as a kid I could feel somethi

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