This TED Talk features development manager, Cheyenne Cochran, recorded live at TEDx Youth at Beacon Street, 2016.

I am from the south side of Chicago, and in seventh grade, I had a best friend named Jenny

who lived on the southwest side of Chicago. Jenny was white, and if you know anything about the segregated

demographics of Chicago, you know that there are not too many black people who live on the southwest side of Chicago,

but Jenny was my girl, and so we would hang out every so often after school and on the weekends.

And so one day we were hanging out in her living room talking about 13-year-old things,

and Jenny's little sister, Rosie, was in the room with us,

and she was sitting behind me just kind of playing in my hair,

and I wasn't thinking too much about what she was doing.

But at a pause in the conversation, Rosie tapped me on the shoulder.

She said, can I ask you a question?

I said, yeah, Rosie, sure. Are you black?

The room froze. Silence. Jenny and Rosie's mom was not too far away. She was in the kitchen,

and she overheard the conversation, and she was mortified.

She said, Rosie, you can't ask people questions like that. And Jenny was my friend, and I know

she was really embarrassed. I felt kind of bad for her, but actually, I was not offended. I figured

it wasn't Rosie's fault that in her 10 short years on this earth,

living on the southwest side of Chicago, she wasn't 100% sure what a black person looked like.

That's fair. But what was more surprising to me was in all of this time I had spent with Jenny

and Rosie's family, hanging out with them, playing with them,

even physically interacting with them.

It was not until Rosie put her hands in my hair that she thought to ask me if I was black.

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