Simone

My mother is black and my father is white, and I know that’s a very common thing in these changin’ times, but I don’t know many biracial people who look like me. I’d call myself light skin, but I’m full on white skin. While I can thankfully tan, I’m very pale. Like one step up from Ivory 001. I have blue eyes, and I bleach the life out of my dirty blonde hair. For a long time, I thought that one day I could set some kind of world record for “Whitest Black Person of All Time.”

Minus the spray tan, and poor attempt at dreadlocks, Rachel Dolezal was the first person I’d ever seen on television who was black, and looked like me. And then I read the scroll across the bottom of the screen, and she wasn’t even black. The struggle to discover my racial identity continued.

To be fair to my childhood delusions, back then, things were a lot worse. Since my hair didn’t develop its identifiable kink until early puberty, the only thing that would make the average white person question my whiteness didn’t exist until I was 11 years old. In that same time period, of my two parents, I spent the most time in public with my black mother. People were confused. I saw it everywhere I went. At school, black kids excluded me, and white kids constantly wondered if I’d been adopted. When kids could finally understand my situation, I got a lot of “Well you’re black, but not like them”s, and “I mean, you’re basically white”s. These days, I look more “exotic,” and anyone with a single brain cell can the find facial resemblance between my mother and me. But waiters still ask my family if we’re all together, and I always feel some weird burden to tell the adults in my life about my racial background before introducing them to my mother. I will do anything to avoid the confusion and stares.

I feel isolated in my experience. I have friends with similar family backgrounds, white father and black mother, or vice versa. But they all look like my little brother: milk chocolate skin, brown eyes, brunette. Anyone can look at them and know they were born to a white father and black mother, or vice versa. They have their own set of problems, dealing with the fetishization of and fascination with mixed race people, facing the discrimination that goes along with looking “ethnic.” In some ways, I can relate to that, but by far the biggest problem in my life is that I’ve only ever met two other people in the same situation as I. (And those two people were related.)

I once had a dream that Pink and Channing Tatum revealed that they had black fathers, confirming my lifelong suspicion that they were both part-African American. Like a double-reverse Dolezal. I woke up feeling so not-alone. But it was a dream.

College stresses me out for reasons deeper than my lackluster GPA. I don’t know how to racially identify. I want to use my background to my benefit; I want to get the education that my maternal grandparents, and their parents, and their parents, couldn’t. But I can’t bring myself to check off “African American.” I’d feel like fucking Soul Man. It doesn’t matter that I have a lot more “drops of blackness” than people who may be ten times darker than me. Going through my life, in almost all situations, I will be treated as a white woman would. I feel weird even complaining about struggling to find who I am, because I know it’s a privilege. If I was born looking darker, growing up in America, I’d be in danger of encountering hatred and violence, every day.

In a society which still deems anyone with a drop of non-whiteness, non-white, I’ve been assigned, countless times—by strangers, family members, peers, close friends—whiteness. So I’ve identified this way. I’ve grown to accept myself as a white person who is entitled to make disparaging generalized statements about white people, and apt to go on lengthy tirades against the race-based systems of oppression put in place by white people. When someone asks “what” I am, I will of course, give them the honest answer. I’m biracial, “half black.” I won’t want to deal with their questions, but when my charade is up, I owe them the truth.

When I talk about black people, I use the pronoun “they” more often than “we.”

I wish I wasn’t this way. ♦