“Why I don’t relate to my skin colour” is a video, created by the creator of the Kidology YouTube channel (I’m going to be calling them Zee, as it’s one of the answers she gave when asked about her name, and the one I see others most often use), and it’s one that I have found myself repeatedly returning to. Zee’s relationship to race and society are polar opposite to mine, and hearing her experiences has pushed me to rethink the way I think of my own race.

Content Warning: The video being referenced, and to a lesser extent this blog post, focuses on racial relations in an institutionally segregated South Africa, and talks about it from the perspective of someone raised within that system.

The most important claim made in the video to me is :

“[being part of a tribe] is incredibly meaningful, to the point that [being part of a tribe is] more meaningful than even the individual when it comes to giving people a sense of purpose– I think I’m an example of what happens when that is absent. I think that that just ends in a lot of bitterness and also a lot of ambiguity in terms of knowing where you stand in the world and in relation to other people-”

-Kidology, 2022

Zee was born in South Africa, and was put up for adoption at birth by her biological Zulu mother. As an orphan Zee was raised by a few white South African families. This combined with, according to Zee, a willingness as a child to distance herself from other Zulus meant that, even though she looks ethnically exactly like a Zulu, she does not consider herself Zulu; and, in many ways, Zulu’s do not consider her as a Zulu. At the same time she never felt like she could build a deep connection with any white people because the rift between their lives was too socially engrained. Zee expected to be free from tribalism when she moved to Britain, and was disappointed to find that she was still treated as an other.

Zee is someone who found herself being rejected every step she took: she was put up for adoption by her mother at birth, scorned by those of the same skin color, moved like a commodity between the white families that raised her, filled the position of the non-opinionated mediator in boarding school, and (while not mentioned in this video) was and is treated as slow and uncivilized when she was shipped away with next to no warning. It’s easy to understand why Zee is so aware of her own isolation, but I couldn’t sit well with the conclusions she had made, I believed she was saying adherence to a conglomerate was necessary to find meaning. I realized later that I misunderstood her claim, unfortunately it wasn’t any less painful. To make her claim clearer to me, and hopefully to you if you need it, I can paraphrase her situation as: Zee is transracial in a global society that is bitter towards, or ignorant to transracial’s.

All it takes is a quick google search to see that people who call themselves transracial are not looked upon fondly (Although much of the criticism centers around white people changing their bodies appearance to match another ethnicity). Zee, a white woman in black skin, who has shown no interest in altering her body to appear more white, has very clearly suffered from this incongruency in her life. I can empathize with Zee’s dissociation with her racial ancestry, but I believe it’s only by luck that I don’t suffer like Zee has, and that comes down to two factors, completely out of her or my control: First, one of the only places on Earth where segregation is more blatant than in America is in South Africa, possibly the most openly segregated nation in the world, and it’s where Zee was born. Second, I’m very lucky to have the appearance that I do. The 3 most common guesses to my ancestry is Native American, Hispanic, and Caucasian with a tan, none of these are true. Being so racially ambiguous means I’m less likely to be placed by strangers, and less likely to be treated differently for it. Zee, on the other hand, is obviously Zulu, evidenced by the fact that strangers often assumed she knew Zulu, and spoke it to her when she lived in South Africa.

Transitioning genders is an incredibly difficult and painful experience for many, and a lot of that pain comes from the rejection of ones gender coming from the rest of the world, and those closest to the one transitioning. As transgendered people becomes more normalized in media and daily life, those who transition will be forced to suffer considerably less. For Zee, there will be no normalization in her lifetime; people will treat her as a Zulu from South Africa which, in every way except the color of her skin, she is not. Learning Zee’s story is sad, but seeing her accept the fact that the world doesn’t care about her is crushing.

The only positive twist I can think of to end this post I can make to this that Zee’s story is one out of who knows how many, and it’s one that’s not done. Her story is the first of her kind that has reached my ears, but if there are more I would love to know. Lastly, if the subject of this post was of any interest to you I encourage you to explore some of Zee’s other videos. I find she does a good job of covering hot button subjects in a nonargumentative and relatively informed approach, which I find exceptionally rare.