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Young, black, and afraid for my brother on Nantucket

I’ve grown up in the same house my brothers did, but as men they carry a burden that I don’t

The Nobadeer Beach party on Nantucket on July Fourth 2015.photography by Bill Hoenk

Every July Fourth my brothers and I have joined the flock of high schoolers and college students at a party on Nantucket’s Nobadeer Beach. The neighbors find it a raucous nuisance, but for us, it’s a joyful midsummer reunion. Before this year’s party, I received a jolt when my older brother Henry texted me and asked me to call him. He wanted to discuss a rumor that Nantucket had asked dozens of police to quell the party, which the previous year had swelled to more than 8,000 people. Henry wouldn’t be at the party, but he was worried about my twin brother, Thad.

“You’ll be fine, Rach,” Henry told me on the phone. “Thad really has to be careful, though, like real careful.

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I keep trying to call him, but he won’t answer. I’m thinking he should skip the beach. Please talk to him.”

My brothers, in their pastel Vineyard Vines shorts and Ray-Ban sunglasses, look like black kids of privilege, which all three of us are. We’ve had incredibly happy and generally similar experiences in our private schools. But in this moment, Henry had the same concerns as those of the dark boys on inner-city corners we meet in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me , his exploration of growing up in this country as a black man. Coates focuses on the vulnerability black men face, specifically in situations involving the police; dark skin and broad shoulders qualify as probable cause wherever they go. I’ve grown up in the same house my brothers did, with the same professor father and surgeon mother, but they carry a burden that I don’t — the burden of being seen as a physical danger.

I didn’t realize this until Henry’s call. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me. Race has been a regular topic at our dinner table for as long as I can remember, and my brothers always seemed to have more to share than I. Unlike them, I haven’t received unsolicited instructions from family friends on how to carry myself in a “white man’s world” or been called a bully simply for looking at a kid too “hard.” But Henry telling me I’d be fine when Thad would not was the first time I heard either of them say my gender made things different. Teachers and parents have always watched my brothers but have also had to watch out on their behalf.

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It’s also true that my father has paid them particular attention since we were little. Long before my brothers could drive, he told them what they should do if they ever got pulled over. He critiqued their manners and clothing in a way he never did with me. These conversations were sparked by an anxiety that plagues all dark families with boys, a tradition of worry passed down from father to son. I was not initiated into it.

Where the worry has evaded me, the stereotyping has not. I’ve had white friends tell me “I like your hair better when it’s straight” or “You are probably the only black person that eats Pinkberry.” It’s annoying, but no more so than when black girls call me an Oreo — black on the outside, white on the inside — because I like Lululemon, SoulCycle, and Sweetgreen. Being upper-middle-class black kids in a mostly white environment places us in an unusual box. Our position pressures us to act “white,” but then white and black students both single us out for not modeling archetypal “black” behavior. Although aggravating, these assumptions pose little danger to me. In our society, I am an anomaly. My brothers are still seen as threats.

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Perhaps I had never been able to see this difference because race fades into the background of my day-to-day life with my white friends. That morning on Nantucket, two of them asked to use my makeup. They forgot theirs at home and assumed that at most, mine would just give them a slight bronze look because “Rachel isn’t that black anyways,” as they tend to say. I laughed, since my makeup wouldn’t go with their paler complexions at all.

Right after that exchange, I got Henry’s text, called him, and heard the nervous tone in his voice. On a day when my skin tone had been forgotten, he was more aware of his color than I had ever seen him.

The cops did come to Nobadeer Beach that day, quashing the party before it really got started. A motorcade of teenage drivers left in their Jeeps, carrying flags and frowns. The residents of Nantucket got their calm day; I got a pensive one. There were no incidents, no singling out of Thad by the police. But I no longer believed my brothers and I navigated the same terrain. I knew now that as they become black men, and I become a black woman, the ground underneath us will shift.

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They will not be asked if their hair is a weave whenever they wear it down.

I will not be a suspect for wearing a hoodie or walking on the street at night.

Rachel Kennedy is a senior at Noble & Greenough School in Dedham, where she is editor in chief of the school’s newspaper. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.