Age: 21 | Hometown: Washington DC
A lot of people don't know what to make of David Brown.
His best friends are black. He's a brother in Phi Beta Sigma, an historically black fraternity. He went to a Washington, D.C., high school where there were a total of four white students.
But his skin is almost white, and he has very light, gray-green eyes.
"Depending on who I'm with, people make a lot of assumptions about me," he says. "I really don't know, when I walk down the street, whether people think I'm white or black. Usually I'm with a group of black friends, so people think I'm also black."
But it's not always that simple.
Once, while Brown was performing with his brothers at a step show at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of hecklers started calling out "J.J. Redick!"-a reference to Duke Basketball's famous white player.
At other step shows, Brown has heard members of the audience saying, "Oh, look at that white boy step" and, "I didn't know white people could step."
Brown, a senior, describes himself as "mixed"-he has has a white mother and a black father. But growing up in Northeast D.C., with his mom's relatives living across the country in California, Brown didn't know very many white people.
When he arrived at Duke, he was a half-white freshman who had never really interacted with white people. His roommate, a Jewish Republican, was one of the first Jews and one of the first Republicans he had ever met. Though he and his roommate eventually became very good friends, he felt most comfortable around black students, going to black fraternity parties on Central Campus instead of following his roommate and hallmates to parties on West.
"It was clear," Brown says. "We could all be together in the hall and during the week and stuff, but once it was the weekend, they would head to West Campus and I would go my own way.... It was a choice."
Pledging Phi Beta Sigma, Brown says, made him a well-known figure among Duke's black students. He explains that since the community is so small, "automatically people know you more, people are looking at you more... paying attention to every little move that you make."
But even as Brown became executive vice president of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (the umbrella organization for Duke's historically black fraternities and sororities), his light skin made being black a little more difficult.
"At the Freedom School, one of the speeches was about white privilege," he says. "And the speaker was saying that if you have white skin, then you're a beneficiary of white privilege. I realize that I do get some of the benefits and privileges that [my black friends] don't.... It's definitely difficult."
But Brown has been dealing with some version of these feelings since he was small. He's always had lighter skin than his friends, and he's always had to deal with questioning looks and awkward glances from strangers.
And those cat-calls and heckles from the audience at step shows don't bother him either. He knows who he is, and he's proud of it.
"A lot of how people react to you is how you carry yourself," Brown says. "I don't necessarily walk around with my head down, and I try to be confident and exude that with everything that I do.... I try to feel like I belong, because I know that I do.
"I think that most people say, 'That's a white boy stepping, but he can step. Hey, he's one of us.'"
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