My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

Inheriting identity versus actually living it

There's something really clarifying about Seales's distinction here: inheriting an identity and actually inhabiting it are two different things. You can grow up with a cultural background baked into your DNA and your household, but that doesn't automatically mean you understand the specific texture of what it means to move through the world as part of a particular community in a particular place and time.

This speaks to something a lot of people experience but don't always name. Whether it's discovering your ethnic heritage through peers, finding your sexuality in a friend group, or understanding your class position through hanging around different people, we often need mirrors outside our families to see ourselves clearly. Those upperclassmen gave Seales not just information but language, context, and permission to understand her own experience. She wasn't learning something entirely new—it was already in her. But she was learning how to recognize it, claim it, and move through the world with that framework.

The quietly radical part is that belonging isn't passive. You don't just receive identity; you step into it, often with other people's help. That process—finding your people and then finding yourself through them—is something worth honoring, whether we're talking about race, culture, or any identity we're trying to actually live into rather than just inherit.