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I was one of a group of nine-yearold girls sitting on a bench out on the hot, treeless playground of Queen Anne Place Elementary School in city-center Los Angeles. We were sitting and waiting-maybe for a bell to ring, maybe because a playground supervisor had" benched" us. Meaningless waiting was not something we questioned. A Black girl at the end of the bench was acting silly, jostling and shouting. We were sitting close on that bench, so another Black girl decided to take on the part of grownup. She said in a slow, wise commanding voice," Girl, stop acting your color." The words struck me, a child raised to watch for racism, like a truck. 1

Matsuda closes the story telling us how it felt-as if a truck had hit her. Why do these words feel like an assault? How must they feel to her black friends? She asks," How could children, so young, know there is such a thing as acting one's color, that it is bad, that it is the opposite …