As I hit my block after an afternoon of running errands, I fell into a conversation with someone who lives up the street from me. Cuban. First generation, I think. Probably around my age. We stood there chatting under a picture-perfect blue sky with our groceries dangling from our wrists. After a significant pause in the conversation, he looks at me over the top of his shades and says, in a semi-confidential tone, "Do you realize that you are the only black girl in your building?"

For a moment, everything came to a screeching halt. I looked at everyone around us. We were surrounded by a tawny patchwork quilt of Spanish-speaking folk, with varying degrees of kink amongst them. Nappy-headed sepia-toned children were all over the place, playing jump rope and jumping up and down around the geyser of a fire hydrant while their brown grandparents played dominoes at card tables on the wide sidewalks. Then I looked at my neighbor. He was just as brown and nappy headed as everyone else on the block-including me. How could he possibly say that I'm the only black girl in my building? I thought everyone out here was black. Am I missing something here?

Maybe. Maybe not.

He explained that he meant African-American in reference to me but that as a Hispanic, he certainly considered himself to be African as well. And I thought, well of course he does. He's from Cuba! I mean, really. How can anyone from anywhere in the Caribbean say that they're not African?

Isn't everyone from Africa anyway?

In a way, it's a matter of perception. If I spoke Spanish as well as everyone else in the neighborhood, I doubt very seriously that I would still be "that black girl." When I first moved here, everyone thought that I was Dominican. Sometimes strangers will approach me, chatting away in Spanish, only to apologize profusely when they realize that I'm not from either side of Hispaniola. Most Dominicans are what a lot of Americans would describe as mixed. I guess that's why when my light-skinned African-American friends come over to visit, my neighbors presume that they are Latino---and treat them with hostility when they don't respond in Spanish.

Blackness doesn't have to be a complicated issue. As far as I can tell, everybody's black: we're all racially mixed. Let's rethink the one drop rule for a moment: What would happen politically in this country if everyone of African ancestry --- all of the Latinos, all of the African Americans and Black Indians, anyone with any black blood in them at all, really --- simply stood together. What kind of a force for change would we be if we could pull that off? I think that the powers that be recognize this threat and fan the flames of divisiveness through the media and all the crap we see on television and in the movies. Throw in our own misconceptions and prejudices against each other and you may as well throw in the towel.

I think I'm going to keep hope alive, though. And learn how to speak Spanish.