Woodson further builds the reader's insight into racial climate of the 1960’s. She describes her birth certificate and notes that she and her parents are “negro”. This demonstrates that Jaqueline is legally racialized from the moment she is born. She ties her birth to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement to show children were not exempt from discrimination and racism, nor were they oblivious from Civil Rights activism. This underscores that racism in the 60’s was institutional and governmental as much as it was interpersonal. In this poem, Woodson shows how memories can be problematic. As Jaqueline describes how various family members tell the story of her birth, she emphasizes the unreliability of memory and how objective reality becomes
