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Hey, it's Marielle.
When Devon Loeb was growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the late 90s,
early 2000s, He rarely saw black and brown people other than his own family members.
I was one of the only kids of color in class within the whole school,
and I often felt like I didn't belong.
And then sometimes I wasn't invited to sleepovers.
I couldn't go out and play with the other kids.
Devon is mixed race.
His mom is black with roots in Alabama, and his dad is white, Jewish, and from Long Island.
And as he became a teenager, Devon found that dating was especially fraught.
The girls in school either didn't want to date him because of his race,
or if they did date him, it felt like kind of a performance.
It was like, let me try to put this hat on.
Like, I'm a dated black guy, but then when I met Jenny,