I walk in a room and I don’t know who to sit next to. There’s a black girl who looks kind but also like she may hate me. There’s a white girl who looks fun but also like she may hate me. There’s a boy who’s cute but he may hate me. A room full of people but they all may hate me. Maybe a universal experience but racial acceptance is a game in my head. Who’s going to accept me for who I am and what I look like? There’s a divide between black and white, but what about the people who are neither? My dad’s side of the family doesn’t think I’m “asian enough”, my mom’s side of the family simply tolerates me, black people think I’m white washed. White people think I’m too ethnic, people act surprised I speak english but people are also surprised I don’t speak Chinese. So what does life look like when you don’t have a “safe” side. It looks like backhanded compliments, fear from everyone, surprised when people DO like you, and a lot of days spent looking in the mirror wondering how you can fit in. Code switching? I live it, but I never know which code to default back on because who I am is not truly accepted, I always have to do my best to fit in.
Thank you for speaking on the “in between” feeling. I only relate in much smaller forms. I hate that you experience ostracizing from your own family. Family should be where you have a place of connection and comfort to come back to after engaging in a world that rejects your whole-ness. Family should teach you security, not insecurity. When we have a home that builds up our confidence, it is so much easier to go into the world demanding to be seen as we are. This, however, does not excuse the behavior of society that has led you to being questioned, judged, and placed as an “in between” person rather than just a person.
This is in no way an attempt to relate on the same scale at all, but more so to share what your writing brought up for me;
My biological mother has SWANA features and small amounts of SWANA ancestry, but is primarily Sicilian. I never knew the full ethnicity of my biological father growing up. I knew that what I was told of him wasn’t ever the full truth, and I knew this by being the child he held closest to his skin for years. By being in his arms, on his chest, and carried by his shoulders, I got the unique views of the ways the light made his skin resemble olives. I took a DNA test eventually and found out that he did in fact have a decent amount of Egyptian and Syrian in his blood, leaving me as a roughly 10% Arab. Leaving me with the daily question of, how small of a percentage is too small to claim? The question alone feels so silly to me to be asking, like I am reaching for something that is so small I should just keep ignoring it. The journey of figuring out what isn’t white-ly ignorant of me to claim, what I am entitled to feel, and what is fair for me to distinguish myself as has been confusing. Do I just continue life leaving behind ancestors that may have been waiting for me to acknowledge them? Do I revel in the joys of being Arab, and is it even fair for me to take space within that joy with the largest percentage of the blood I carry in this body being Ashkenazi and Sicilian? Truly, I do not fucking know where I belong. So in that sense, I hear you.