"Music and the Racial Imagination" triggered the reminiscences from the author's teens described in the "diary presented in this article." These memories undoubtedly played a role in her decision to enter an undergraduate music education program at the age of 40. These and other memories have been called up in a variety of contexts more recently over the course of her doctoral research in music and anti-racism education. The ways in which humans make use of music to construct race, nationality, gender, and other fixed identities troubles her, because she sincerely believes in such constructions, individuals look through only one of music's prismatic facets, closing themselves to its multiple possibilities.