by Albert Chu

Created on: June 01, 2008

They call me Miracle. Normally, you'd never pick me out as someone special. You couldn't tell just by looking at me. On the outside, I was just another black kid, who you thought was wasting his life away. If you were an Asian kid who went to my school, your parents would tell you not to be friends with me because I might bring down your grade point average or SAT score. If you were a white kid, you'd want to hang out with me because you thought I could supply you the alcohol, drugs, or whatever else you needed for that killer party you were having next week. If you were a black kid, you'd just want to be around me because us black people have to "stick together". That's who a normal black kid as my school was. Nothing special. And definitely not worth a miracle.

But even though you've already judged me, others have gotten to know me. They also judge me, but not ignorantly. Like most black kids, everyone at my school refers to each other by the N-word. But my mother always told me to never use that word. Never ever. She would scream when I let it slip out sometimes, back when I was in middle school and was trying to act all "gangsta". Not now though. But some of the black kids around me felt alienated when I didn't say it. I came up with something I felt wasn't as offensive.
"Hey, what's up, negro?" I said to my friend Vir. He was my first friend at this school. We was like peas and carrots. Hah, sorry about that. Watched a funny movie yesterday.
"Yo, what's up?" he would reply back in a deep voice.
I felt that "negro" was better than the actual N-word. It might not have been, as far as my mother was concerned though. She detested the N-word because of its origin with slavery. Negro wasn't much better most likely. Though negro is "black" in Spanish right? So I was just practicing my Spanish. That's all.
My friends started to pick up on it, and of course, the slang versions arrived. "Gro" was the usual term you heard around the black community now. "What's up gro" and "Yo bro gro" were all popular. I was a trend setter, what can I say?

* * *

It wasn't always like this. When I first got here, I was just another face around here, another black clogging up the hallway. For the first couple weeks, I was just the new kid. Some N-word who transferred from somewhere with more white people. I admit that I felt a bit awkward at first. Everyone had to put up their own front, never let their guard down. I was intimidated. And everyone saw that, not just the other N-words. The

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