A Birthday Reflection on Exposure, Identity, and the Illusion of Sides

By Angela Fontaine, ACC | February 20, 2026

She would have been me in every way that matters. Biracial. Someone who sees the thing underneath the thing. A person who moves between worlds because she has never been fully claimed by any one of them. But the world she was born into would have named her differently, treated her differently, and given her no room to interpret what she was living through.

Dysfunction Wasn’t Hidden. It Was Law.

The girl born in 1940, growing up in that America, wouldn't have needed to look hard to find evidence that the institutions around her weren't built for her. Redlining told her which neighborhoods she could inhabit. The GI Bill, one of the greatest wealth-building tools in American history, was administered in ways that systematically excluded Black veterans while building the white middle class. Jim Crow didn't whisper. It posted signs to keep her in a place that required her smallness in order to sustain itself.

And as a biracial girl growing up in that world, she would have existed in a particular kind of purgatory. Too Black for one world, too ambiguous for another. The one-drop rule didn't ask about her experience or her identity. It decided for her. Race, after all, is a social construct, a system of classification invented to organize power. She would have learned early that binary thinking wasn't just a social preference. It was enforced. She would have had no luxury of wondering whether the system was broken. She would have known it was working exactly as designed. Just not for her.

The Signs Came Down. The Language Changed. The Structure Stayed.

I was born in 1983. By then, the explicit version had been legislated away. I grew up inside the coded version. Redlining got rebranded as "neighborhood trends" and "school quality." Wealth gaps got explained as personal failing or cultural deficiency. Institutional bias got dressed up in neutral policy language. Candidates from certain zip codes screened out before an interview. Lending standards that penalized non-traditional credit histories. The dysfunction was still there. It had just learned to speak in a way that gave everyone plausible deniability. For my entire 43 years, I have been impacted by and watched systems, government agencies, nonprofits, school boards, community organizations, operate with a significant gap between what they say they do and what they actually do. I have sat in rooms where that gap was the open secret no one named. A large portion of my business exists specifically to help leaders see it, name it, and build something better in its place.

That Is Not Deterioration. That Is Exposure.

So here is what I believe about this moment, and why my gut is telling me something different than the panic I see around me: what is being exposed has always existed.

What we're watching isn't evidence of a country falling apart. It is evidence of a country being forced, finally, to look at what has been present for the entirety of my life and long before it. The gap between the story we told about our institutions and the reality of how they operated is simply harder to maintain right now. That is not deterioration. That is exposure. And exposure, for all its discomfort, is the prerequisite for anything real.

I have never had the option of living inside the binary, because the binary has never fully claimed me. I didn't get to pick a side. I was, from the beginning, the space between, and that position, which carries its own kind of loneliness, also gave me something invaluable, the ability to see the whole. When you have always existed at the intersection, you stop being able to pretend that any one side holds the complete picture. You see how the same fears animate different groups. You see how the same wounds show up in different bodies. You see how often "opposite" sides are actually mirror images of each other, reaching for the same things: safety, dignity, belonging, meaning, through different languages and different histories.

We are not divided into separate stories. We are one story, with many narrators who have been told they are enemies when they are, in fact, kin. We are all connected. That is not a bumper sticker sentiment to me. It is something I have known in my bones since I was old enough to understand that I belonged fully to no single group and partially to all of them.

The woman born in 1940 would be arriving at 43 in 1983, watching the birth of the information age from the outside, the early signals of a world about to accelerate beyond recognition. She would have arrived there having survived the most explicit version of what I have lived in coded form. I arrive at 43 watching the codes come off.

And rather than fear it, I find myself strangely at peace with the unraveling we're observing. Not because it isn't difficult. It is. Not because there aren't real stakes. There are. But because what is being revealed was always true. We are simply being asked, finally, to stop pretending otherwise.

The Unraveling Gives Us Opportunity.

The girl born in 1940 didn't have the option of not pretending. Survival often required it. She likely learned early how to perform normalcy, how to move through spaces that were hostile to her existence, how to smile at people who saw her as less. That kind of pretending doesn't come from weakness. It comes from having no other choice. And what it costs a person, what it requires them to bury inside themselves just to get through the day, is something I think about often.

I arrive at 43 in a moment where the pretending is becoming more difficult. And I find I have no desire to mourn that. What is being revealed is an invitation to finally build what we always claimed we were building. I've been waiting for this my whole life.

Bring it.