No, I'm not an Oreo. I'm not "whiter" than you and you're damn sure not "blacker" than me because you know all the lyrics to *insert rap song here*.

Don't say that I'm white on the inside because you refuse to connect the positive attributes of my personality or the success that I've had in life to the brown skin that I'm in, or because you don't have the capacity to recognize that blackness and the attributes of my personality can be connected.

From the time that I was in middle school people began calling some of my friends and I "Oreos" because to them we were, "black on the outside and white on the inside." They considered us white on the inside for everything from the types of music we listened to, to the clothes we wore, to the way that we spoke, to the clubs that we joined.

But we aren't cookies, we are people. The things we like and the way that we speak do not define our race or our culture because blackness is not a monolith. Blackness and all of the expressions of it are a multitude and just because someone can't recognize that doesn't give them the right to devalue my blackness by calling me, "white on the inside."

When you call me, "white on the inside" or an "Oreo" it's not a compliment at all. Whiteness is not what I strive for and no matter how "white" you think I am, I still have to work twice as hard to get half of what you get because of the color of my skin; which you refuse to accept.

My qualities and my success are not a reflection of "whiteness" but a reflection of me - a black man. So please stop calling me an Oreo because you think that the positive attributes are because of my "inner-whiteness" because they're not.