I am (My name), a biracial, 16-year old female from the (my hometown). I live in (my hometown) with my mother, a single parent of the Caucasian race, in a small two bedroom home. For most of my life, this is how I’ve been defined, and for most of my life, it hasn’t mattered much to me. But during the fall of my fourth grade year, this complacency with definition changed dramatically.
I had just begun attending a world renowned, private, all-girl, college preparatory school in an upscale suburb of Cleveland. It was an honor and a treat to be among one of the classes of women who were to “change the world.” However, there were things that I had begun to notice about my fellow classmates that separated me from them.
For one, most of my classmates had never heard of the word small. Now, I don’t mean this literally because of course they had heard of the word. What I mean is that the word just wasn’t in their vocabulary because everything they received was, in fact, large. Their fathers were CEO’s and their mothers stayed at home catering to their children. Most didn’t really know the value of money because it wasn’t polite to bring it up in conversation, but also because there was no reason for it to be brought up. Usually, the talk of money comes into discussion when there’s a lack of it. And there was no lack of it on their end. Even though these were differences that could make one very envious of their neighbor, I was content with who I was and where I came from.
However, one day, a difference that had never crossed my mind came to me in the form of a question by a fellow classmate. We were seated on pillows next to a large arm chair used by the teacher, Ms. Cameron, to read us books we picked out. The windows were cracked slightly, and the cool autumn air brushed against our skin. I sat next to the bookcase with my pillow placed behind me, propping myself up.
One of my classmates slowly inched her way over to me, sitting right next to the edge of the bookcase I was leaning against. She stared at me for a while and then, without warning asked, “Are you adopted?” I looked at her with befuddlement, but politely replied “No.” I then backed up my short statement with, “Why would you think that?” She replied to my question with a nonchalant “You’re mother is white and you are black.”
Even now as I write the memory, I feel a pain like a sharp dagger going straight through my heart. No one had ever pointed that out to me before. It could’ve been because it didn’t matter, but more so because it wasn’t polite to mention it. You see, growing up with a Caucasian mother hadn’t set any racial boundary lines in my mind. I figured love was love and if you felt it for another, it was okay and it was okay to everyone else.
This was a naïve assumption. Not because love can sometimes be naturally discriminatory, but because society almost always is. No matter what we try and tell ourselves, there is and will probably always be racial ignorance in the world. It isn’t because we choose to think that way, though some do. It’s more because we don’t understand the plight that comes with being individuals in a world that groups us. We don’t understand it because we can’t. We all grow up different colors, practicing different religions, learning different rights and wrongs. And one does not understand the ways of the other individual because they’ve never experienced it for themselves.
Looking back on the incident, I learned something greater than anything we could ever be taught at birth. When I felt the sting of ignorance, I learned not only that I would probably face it the rest of my life, but that I, in some uncommon way, could beat it, merely because of the different races of my parents. I saw myself as a new generation of person. One who could see the many plights of the individual, and could somehow teach the world about it. I’ve embraced some of society’s ignorance and learned from it. Most importantly, I’ve learned how to embrace the simple fact that my mother is white and I am black and that it’s okay.
