Yayoi Lena Winfrey will never forget her first brush with ignorance. She was walking home with her younger sister when a neighbor, a firefighter watering his garden at the time, suddenly turned towards them and hissed, “Nigger.”

 Yayoi was 11 years old, her sister, eight, and they were both baffled. “We were like, ‘oh, what did we do wrong?’” Before then, neither sister had ever experienced racism. The daughter of a Japanese war bride and an African-American soldier, Yayoi spent the first decade of her life in military bases where she says race wasn’t an issue. “I never heard anybody saying anything to anybody, calling anybody names,” Yayoi recalls. “It was just like being in the U.N. and we were all kin.”

 Everything changed when Yayoi’s family moved into the working-class class neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington. “None of the children were allowed to play in our yard,” Yayoi remembers. “They’d come to the edge of our yard and they’d say, ‘we’re not allowed to play in your yard.’ They would look at us like we were animals or something.”

 It didn’t help that Yayoi and her sister had no one to talk to about it. “My mother coming from Japan she is very, very Japanese. Her English was limited so she was not someone you sat down and talked to about these kind of things,” Yayoi explains. Her father, a Black man from the south “had his own kind of pain to deal with.”

 Not long ago, while interviewing him for an anthology, Yayoi found out that her father had been a slave. “He was telling me about being a kid in a one-room school in a small little country town with one teacher and how in the afternoon they  [white people]  come get us and we’d pick cotton.” Yayoi’s first reaction was, “Cool, at least you were able to get some money.”

 “Money? What money?” her father told her. “We picked cotton all afternoon but we never got paid.”

Despite the lack of discussion about race in their home, Yayoi and her sister found themselves gravitating towards the Black National movement, immersing themselves in radical ideologies. “My sister and I were searching for our identity, subconsciously, though we didn’t know that’s what we were doing,” she explains. “I think we were just so angry, but we didn’t know that. The people that we read about, we saw had the same kind of anger and we connected. The more we explored, the more we read, the more we learned about Black history in America, we were just like auughh!”

 Though pro-Black, Yayoi was also very much Japanese. At home she ate Japanese food, watched Japanese movies and practiced pronouncing Japanese nouns correctly with her mother. “It was very weird to reconcile those two cultures because we were angry Black radical nationalist and then we were very Japanese,” she explains. “It’s funny because I would meet a Japanese-American person on the street and I would know more about Japanese culture and history than they would, though people would never think so.”

 Rather than choose sides, Yayoi and her sister decided to embrace both cultures. In the mid 80’s her sister coined the term “Jafrican” and declared, “you know what I’m both. I’m proud to be both.” Yayoi also feels the same way though it took years of analyzing and figuring things out to get to that point. “I really totally feel both. I know some people feel closer to one side than the other, for me, I feel both and I’m not letting anybody take either one away from me.”