Invisible Identities: When the Person Before You is Not Exactly What they Seem

I must admit, I paused when I got a resume from Braidan, a cheerful and well-mannered graduate student in our MA Journalism Program at Hofstra University. I’d never hired a white male research assistant before. None had ever applied.

But I could see that Braidan was different. He was an amiable, tattooed dude from my home state of California; a self-described member of the “surfer-slash-football” crowd at Santa Cruz High School. I knew something about the eclectic vibe of Santa Cruz, having…