Raised in South Minneapolis by Black middle-class parents, Hendon and her brother Ira were told early on by her adoptive parents that they were chosen. It left her with the overriding question, \u201cWhy did my birthmother give me up?\u201d, a question that would follow her into her adult life. As a child, she made a call to the agency, only to come up against a brick wall when it came to her adoption records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a man of a certain age, reading her memoir was a trip down Memory Lane to the Minneapolis of the 1960s through the early 1980s. I remember so many of the establishments around during that time, and as a child I remember Trash Can Annie. Yes, KUXL, our only R&B station, went off the air at sunset, and I-94 wasn\u2019t yet completed through the North Side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hendon recalls the colorism in the community, the Northside\/Southside rivalry, and the cultural divide when she attended Breck School in junior high school. At 16, she experienced the agony of a stillborn daughter, and the anger that stemmed from an intolerance to rejection. Indeed, her early life went off the rails with toxic relationships with men, drugs, alcohol, and self-worth issues. With the pimp culture proliferating during that time, she refused to become a prostitute and wind up on the Minnesota Strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her 20s, she learned that she was biracial, and ultimately learned valuable lessons about family, finding God, and finding herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hendon works as a development director at Isuroon, and volunteers as a guardian ad litem for Hennepin County\u2019s Fourth Judicial District, advocating in court for children in the child welfare system. She enjoys writing memoir, short stories, and poetry. Her poetry and short stories can be found in Ishmael Reed\u2019s Konch Magazine<\/em> and the Minnesota Literacy Council\u2019s Black Literacy Matters Anthology.<\/em> Blend In or Fade Out<\/em> can be purchased through Amazon, Strive Publishing<\/em>, and the Minnesota Black Authors Expo website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once I picked this book up, I couldn\u2019t put it down. Thank you, Colnese, for your testimony that no situation is impossible, and no one can tell your story like you can. I have no doubt that your story has touched and will continue to touch many lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By Colnese M. Hendon Who am I? Where do I come from? Why do I look so different from Mom and Dad? Those are questions that arise when a person has been adopted, with some more than others. Such was the case in a journey for identity, powerfully illustrated in Colnese Hendon\u2019s memoir, Blend In or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[359,358,38],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-colorism","tag-middle-class","tag-minneapolis","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Blend-In-or-Fade-Out-e1738874169268.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Colnese.png\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"