What's good, y'all? You are listening to Coast Witch. I'm Gene Demby.

We've had a lot of very candid conversations over the years on the show with people working through

big, chewy questions about who they are, like trying to make sense of just where they fit in

in our weird, contradictory racial landscape. Because the way a lot of people see themselves

isn't static, in part because the way other people see them isn't static. We spoken to listeners

of color who were adopted as children by white parents and they were raised in neighborhoods

that were all white, you know, except for themselves. And they were having experiences different

from the people around them, but they didn't have the vocabulary to talk about it because

their white parents didn't talk about race. Or on the flip side, we've also spoken to people

who told us that even though they were born and raised in their black or Latino or Iranian families,

that they personally felt like racial imposter because other people were not reading them that way.

Maybe they didn't look or sound black or Latino or Iranian enough. You know, I'm doing air quotes

around all those things, right? We're going to get into that later, but for the first part of our

episode, we're going to hear this fascinating story that I just could not get out of my head as

someone who has a twin and who grew up very close to someone and there's always calling up my

sister to make sure that she remembers things the way I remember them. It's about two people who

also grew up together, spent their childhoods, looking at like, you know, drinking from the same

water, but the math on how they show up in the world ended up being really different. It comes

from my colleague, Marilyn Williams. Marilyn is an executive producer here on Coatswitch and she and

her sister, they've always been mad close. They just 14 months apart in age.

Maybe first, it's like introduced who you are. Just, hi, I'm love this Williams and I am

Marilyn Williams's sister. And they sound a lot alike. Here's Marilyn again. Growing up,

...