Coming Out as Biracial Here it is: My mother is black. My dad is white. Two of my siblings look like my mom, and two of us look like my dad. Of the two who favor my dad, only one is biracial—that’d be me, the pigmentally challenged Michael Jackson of our troupe. Are you confused yet? Good. Welcome to what it’s like to be biracial. I grew up in a culturally diverse environment, which meant I missed the memo that it’s “not normal” to be mixed. In fact, I grew up believing the opposite—in my grammar school class of thirty kids, five were mixed race. Not a bad ratio. So I didn’t discover my otherness through being teased by peers or by having after-school-special chats with my parents. I discovered it in other ways, like when strangers would mistake my mother for my nanny, would stare at a black woman holding a white child’s hand in the middle of a crowded flea market. Or when I finally figured out why Mom always stayed home whenever we visited Dad’s parents in Florida. I figured it out when I began obsessively clipping photos of Tyra Banks from my mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs and when I began hoarding pictures of my aunt, who I didn’t even like but thought was beautiful. I was collecting portraits of black beauty I couldn’t have for myself. Biracial people are largely invisible as a group; we get tossed into whatever category we resemble most. We’re expected to choose black or white (or Indian, or Chinese, or whatever traits dominate). But lots of us don’t want to quietly “Circle One.” Some things aren’t black or white. Like human beings. https://medium/human-parts/c25d6ae8f2af
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 03:13:23 +0000
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