Some days, my skin is a bridge. Some days, it is a border.

 Some days, my skin is a bridge. Some days, it is a border.

Joanna Boer, September, 2025,  Open Mic, Foundations of Social Work, Columbia University, Professor San Emeterio

Some days, it carries me across oceans from Trinidad, to Nigeria, to Kenya, to Michigan.
A bridge between islands, continents, histories.

Between my great grandmother who crossed the kali pani, born in a boat,
to grandmother who survived violence and addiction,
and my children who inherit possibility.

Some days, it is a border.
The gaze that says, you are other.
The silence that falls in a room,
when my complexion enters before my words.

The limits placed on me
spoken and unspoken
the values placed on me
measured against someone else’s scale.

But some days, my skin is a bridge.
It connects me to my husband,
a white man I love, but who could never hold all that I am.

It carries into our children
the magic of resemblance
faces that hold both of us,
and remind me that borders, or bridges,
are never the whole story:
there is land in-between and water underneath.

And yet, some days, my skin is a border.

It reminds me of the need for boundaries
to resist being tokenized,
to protect my dignity,
to say: this far, no further.

I hold this tension:
bridge and border,
connection and protection,
belonging and boundary.

This is the work of decolonizing.
I refuse the labels written for me.
I will not be your “minority,”
your “other,” your “exotic.”
Every day I will choose how I will show up.
I am sovereign over myself, no longer colonized.

So I say again:
Some days, my skin is a bridge.
Some days, it is a border.
But every day it is mine.