Mixed in Public School

Anytime I reflect on my time as a mixed person in public school, I immediately place myself in the lunchroom scene from Mean Girls, except there are only two tables for my anxious eyes to dart between: the black kids and the white kids. Now, cut to me clutching my lunch tray, feeling too white for one table and too black for the other. School was a whirlwind of me desperately trying to assign my identity to what other people told me it should be, and it started with my race.

Though race can feel like a very basic piece of our identities, it is an enormous one.

I had a lot of white friends in high school. In fact, 73.8% of the people who attended the school I went to were white and my peers quickly taught me what society taught them – to erase my blackness. “You are so white,” quickly became a compliment that I looked forward to hearing. People would even tell me they forgot that I was black, insinuating that my blackness was something that they wanted to forget. I was being taught which part of myself to love and which to not. Whether they knew it or not, they were puppeteering a massive piece of my identity.

In eighth grade, I learned that when you have brown skin, Sweden is an unacceptable answer when your geography teacher asks the class to share where your family originates from. Even if you talked to your mom and that is a part of your family’s heritage. Even if you asked your dad and he didn’t know exact origins. Even if the transatlantic slave trade happened and wiped information about the roots of many African Americans, so you don’t have an answer that seems to better suit where your geography teacher would like to place you racially based on the pigment of your skin. I didn’t have an answer for when someone looked at me and asked “what are you?” and I so desperately wanted one.

For while, I thought if I knew the origin of the black side of my family, it would solve my identity crisis. I was tired of taking acting classes in college and being told that my type was just “ethnic” or “exotic” or “ambiguously brown.” I craved the specificity to create who I was. As much as buying a 23&Me kit could bring some temporary solace to my soul, it wouldn’t solve the deep-rooted traumas that being a young mixed person experiencing the world had given me. It took me learning to love my blackness before I could allow myself to explore my identity. In loving my blackness, I began to ask more questions of my family history. About the people, their interests, their lives. Listening to stories of my dad and his childhood often make me feel more connected to a piece of myself that I thought I lost. If you find yourself feeling lost like I did, start small. Ask questions. I learned about my Aunt Ann who was an incredible jazz singer that had a laugh that could infect you as quickly as her voice could melt you. Jazz is a huge part of black history and it is a piece of history that lives within who I am. This is as valid as a piece of my identity as I choose to make it, and it is not any less of my identity because a part of me is white.

Mixed people are far more than a faded version of their assumed race, and if you’ve ever felt that way, I hope you come to see the incredible work of art that you are. We are masterpieces, but you can’t create something incredible if you’re constantly breaking pieces off of it. If I could go back to middle school and tell the Maya that destroyed her precious curls with a hot iron every day that she was a masterpiece, I would do it in a heartbeat. We don’t exist to choose a side. There were a lot of things about myself that I didn’t explore because I was worried about where other people were going to place me depending on my racial identity. This just in – what other people say you are does not matter. How you choose to identify is the most important part of the equation.

Now, cut to me holding my lunch tray, looking confident and cute, realizing that the pressure to choose a table is not one that I will let chip away at who I am.

Being mixed is dope, and so are you.