One year I went to Ethnic Heritage Day at IBM as a Florida cracker.

I wore overalls, a feed-sack shirt, red horsehide brogans, and a jipijapa hat for an ethnic costume. The ethnic dish I prepared was a banana pudding with a yard-egg meringue. I browned the peaks.

The Florida cracker is an identifiable type. Mainly in the glades, central Florida, or the Florida panhandle. Not so many in south Florida.

But when I was growing up, Delray Beach was small, and agriculture was an important sector of the economy. Produce farms and dairies. Except up next to the coast, with the tourism trade, it was almost rural.

And the teams we played in football, basketball, and baseball, out around Lake Okeechobee, were certainly rural.

Plus, Brenda's family were fishermen, oystermen, and shrimpers, so up there, even the coastal communities were rural. There was no tourism to speak of. No outlanders.

I was a hick. Did that make me a bad person?

I was a militant hick. But that was ironic.

I was a postmodern hick, deconstructing race.

Going to Ethnic Heritage Day as a Florida cracker was meant to provoke a reaction. It was theater. I was stating, by action, "I am not a racist, I am sous rature, or under erasure. What about me?"

Black people had Black History Month, and it lasted six weeks, from Martin Luther King's birthday to the end of February. What did a Florida cracker have? A Florida cracker didn't have nothing because he was, prima facie, a racist.

I ain't afraid of a large black man because I have no hate in my heart. I have nothing to be ashamed of. In my heart.

I don't like them, always, but they don't like me.

It's just in the nature of the way things works.

We're different.

That's diversity's strength.

You can be you and I can be me.

If you look askance at me, you're a racist.