I am not going to sit here and act as if I have always fully embraced my Blackness. Since childhood, I was taught to fear my own marginalization. I would check the “Other” box on questionnaires when I was prompted to identify my race, instead of “Black.” I would smile and accept “compliments” from family members who commented on how light-skinned I was. I would sit for hours in a salon chair, twice a year for 12 consecutive years, to have my hair relaxed in order to achieve a Eurocentric, “pelo bueno” ideal of beauty. It wasn’t until I took an ancestry DNA test which laid out my African ancestry in front of me that I started to fully embrace my Blackness and identify as both Black and Latina. My Blackness sat staring at me throughout my entire life, but it wasn’t until I had the facts in front of me that I started to fully acknowledge it––that’s how ingrained my socialized self-hatred was; that’s how ingrained socialized self-hatred is for many Black Dominicans still coming to terms with their Blackness.