I was not born Black. The birth certificate issued in Rockdale County, Georgia, more than 69 years ago, identified me as “colored,” as were my parents. But I didn’t “happen to turn Black,” the way Donald Trump seems to think is possible.

Once upon a time, anything that smacked of Black, as the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged the year before my birth, held negative connotations — especially where race was concerned in this country.

John H. Johnson, the late publisher, told me years ago that his choice of “Ebony” as the name of the magazine he launched in 1945 was controversial because it sounded like something akin to that offensive term. “For the first few months,” he said, “quite a few people wrote letters and said, ‘Why are you calling us black? We’re not black. We’re Negro.’ ”

That began to change, he said, when Ghana gained its independence in 1957 and the masses of “Negroes” saw a Black man become head of state. They began to learn that Africa was not as it was depicted in Tarzan movies. In those staples of Saturday television, Africa was a vast place swarming with chimpanzees smarter than primitive Black people and all of them looked to a half-naked European man named Tarzan to guide them.

My journey from being colored in rural Georgia in 1955 to being the proud Black Afrocentric woman that I am now has been a process — one that, as a hymn says, “many a thousand” of my fellow travelers have undergone. More than a linguistic evolution, this was an undoing of centuries of brainwashing. Contrary to what a presidential candidate would have the world believe, being Black is not an identity that one adds to one’s appearance for convenience with the ease that he might apply bronzer to seem tanned and fit.

For those of us who integrated schools, neighborhoods, professions and corporations, the process involved correctives for the miseducation that Carter G. Woodson was writing about in the 1930s. We educated ourselves by any means necessary. We demanded textbook revisions and African American studies. We embraced anything that tied us to what was once known as The Dark Continent: names, clothing, foods, hairstyles, music, literature, language — even a holiday called Kwanzaa.

We waged battles in the 1980s and 1990s to convince news companies, government agencies, and corporate America to stop referring to us as “Negroes.” When The New York Times finally acceded to entreaties of prominent scholars and civil rights activists to capitalize the “n” in “negro” in 1930, it haughtily explained that “it is not a small thing in its implications. Every use of the capital ‘N’ becomes a tribute to millions who have risen from a low estate into ‘the brotherhood of the races.’ ”

The “b” capitalized in Black did not become widely accepted until 2020 when the Associated Press announced its new policy and The Times and others followed. “It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black,” a Times editor said then, “but for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.”

All of this has less to do with words per se than it does with a people demanding a say in how they are perceived and the rules of their engagement in a multiracial, multiethnic society that today some MAGA leading lights say should adhere to the thinking of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857: that Black people were not and could not ever be citizens of these United States. Masters of the universe, as some white men have declared themselves from the founding days of this nation, meticulously crafted laws to determine who would inherit the benefits of being white, including taking land as part of their manifest destiny, voting, serving on juries, obtaining education. They declared who would bear the burden of being what they determined to be Black based on fractions of DNA. This group was cursed with slavery, second-class citizenship, exclusion from neighborhoods, jobs and schools. The masters could declare sexual race-mixing a crime, while populating their universe with mixed-race children who carried their genes.

Now one who has clawed his way into the class of the high and mighty has the audacity to question how the child of a Black man and a Southeast Asian woman fuses these genetic and cultural backgrounds to become Kamala Harris. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from two former British colonial territories that operated with familiar notions of caste and class, racial superiority and inferiority. Trump revealed ignorance and pettiness when he told a gathering of journalists in August: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” He repeated this nonsense during the presidential debate with Harris.

White people don’t get to choose our identities anymore. We get to say who we are, based on our interpretations of our makeup.(I exclude frauds like Rachel Dolezal and George Santos). Some of us call ourselves Black; some prefer African American; a few use “colored”. Their journey. Their prerogative. Our identities have been forged through blood, sweat and tears, but also mental and spiritual transformations. As Maya Angelou said, “[our] passages have been paid.”