Strapped for Life

Because that’s exactly what he was for the first three decades of his life.

Raised by his Sri Lankan mother and Caucasian stepfather in a lower-middle-class town in Orange County, California, populated by mostly Mexicans, Asians, and whites, the dark-brown skin that Omar Pryce inherited from his biological Jamaican father was a rarity in his town, his school, and even his home. From a very young age, he felt like a stranger in his own world.

“By the time I was eight, I would lie awake at night pondering who I was. I struggled with the feeling of not fitting in,” Yehudah says today of the Omar of his childhood. “I was bullied and harassed for being black, and I absorbed the message that there was something inherently wrong with me. I saw my father very inconsistently, and so I had no black role model to negate that message and set a positive example for living a moral and successful life. Well-meaning people would tell me I’m not really black since my family was white — my three half-siblings are light-skinned — and I’d ruminate on that, but it left me even more confused.”

Eventually, young Omar concluded that the rules of society were made up by people.