We often encourage people to discard the deeply held viewpoints the rest of the herd finds uncomfortable to hear.

Dissenting voices disrupt the direction of the herd, and even if it’s traveling on a path that leads off an illogical cliff, it would rather die together than listen to the black sheep’s objections.

But what if your very existence makes you a black sheep?

What if your birth upsets the herd because it challenges the group’s singular conception of what it means to be a sheep?

America is plagued with its obsession over racial categorization, with human beings reduced to checkboxes on a census form where you’re supposed to select only one.

But what if selecting one doesn’t tell your whole story?

Sage Steele, former ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor, appeared on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” days after settling her free-speech lawsuit with the network last week for a revealing discussion — especially on race and her public comments about embracing being “biracial.”

She started by recalling her interaction with the late Barbara Walters as a guest on “The View” in 2014; Walters took umbrage with Steele referring to herself as biracial instead of simply “black” like former President Barack Obama does.

When Steele related that experience on a podcast in 2021 — and talked of being forced to get the COVID vaccine to keep her job —  ESPN took her off the air.

“I am so blessed to be loved equally by my white family as well as my black family. And if anything, people talk about how much I hate myself and I must hate my black father and my black family,” Steele tearfully told Kelly.

“This is my story, I can feel how I want about my upbringing. And I am so proud of my family, and to tell me that it’s not OK to have that opinion is wrong,” she continued.

“And the thing is, whenever I have talked about being biracial and it has been controversial — other times, not to this level — I’ve had people wait in line for an hour, young biracial kids say, ‘Thank you because I get forced to choose.’ And it’s interesting because you’re only pushed to choose one side. If I had said, ‘I’m a black woman, don’t call me biracial,’ I would have been celebrated.”

Steele is describing the life of a racial black sheep whose existence makes others around her, like Barbara Walters, uncomfortable because she refuses to conform to one category.

I empathize with Steele and other biracial people’s struggle for understanding because my son is biracial and he feels it’s unfair to choose which part of himself he loves more than the other.

The world can often feel like a lonely place, and most people can’t stand to live their lives never fitting into any group.

So for biracial children to be part of the herd, they must live a lie by begrudgingly socially distancing themselves from half their existence.

Steele was supposed to adopt a private and a public position — privately loving both her families, who look superficially different while similarly treating her with love, but publicly favoring one side to the detriment of the other.

While the legal principle of the “one-drop rule” for racial classification — meaning you’re classified as black if you have one drop of “black blood” or black ancestry — is no longer in place, socially we use it with biracial people.

If Obama said he’s white and never acknowledged his other half, people would ridicule him for being anti-black and claim he hates himself.

This isn’t practiced in the reverse, though. That’s the one-drop rule in effect.

But disingenuous people claim Steele is trying to reject being black rather than embracing her uniqueness of crossing racial lines simply by existing.

For her to love herself, she needs to love all aspects of herself, but we’re preaching that biracial people should live their lives glass half empty and never publicly full.

I can appreciate Steele’s care to not give the impression she’s disregarding one side of her family because as a father of a biracial child I would feel uncomfortable if my son only embraced half his family to satisfy a herd of strangers.

I raised my son to embrace being a black sheep because being a man of good character matters more than pleasing the perspectives of strangers.

I never made him interpret the love he receives from either side of his family as being black love or white love — just love.

More so, I never encouraged him to choose between the black father he looks up to and the white mother who nurtured him because it would be a disservice to him to deny his whole self.

Steele may have upset the herd, but at least she didn’t follow it off the cliff.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.