‘Black Because She is not White’: Navigating the Complexity of a Mixed-Race Identity

By Teanne Buxton

‘I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior or just plain wrong.’ — Audre Lourde

Childhood

A young girl steps into the bathroom of her home and locks the door behind her. The bathroom itself is unremarkable yet has a particular hold over the girl; it contains one of only two mirrors in the house. The other mirror sits in the living room on top of the radiator. The living room mirror is where her mother drags a comb through her ‘thick’ hair and creams her face with Vaseline. The bathroom mirror is where the girl can stare at her reflection in private. She walks over and steps onto the bathtub's edge and balances to better see herself because she is still too short to see into the mirror properly.

An unease comes over the girl – the reflection that looks back is a stranger to her. It looks like her and moves like her but it is not her. She stares into the eyes of the stranger; they stare back with no love. She touches her hair, the hair that is constantly touched by others, including those she calls friends. She touches her brown skin and remembers the boy who asked her if she was Indian. She puzzles over why he would think she was.

This ritual continues for years. As her body grows, she no longer needs to stand precariously on the edge of the bath. She begins to understand why that reflection is not hers. The reflection is Black. Despite having a white father, she is Black because she is not White. She becomes hostile towards the reflection. Why can’t you be something else? Something better?

She grew up in a mostly white town. Her mother, who moved them there when she was six, wanted a ‘better’ life. At school her White friends would laugh when she axed questions, so now she makes sure to ask them. To this day, she corrects herself. She didn’t writ this, she wrote this. As she adopts the ‘White’ behaviours of her friends it alienates her from her family. Why do you act like you’re white? I can’t believe you listen to rock music. You’re such a Malteser: White on the inside, Black on the outside.

She truly felt ‘other’, like she didn’t belong. Like the rest of society, she attributed that ‘otherness’ to her body. Hair and skin become signifiers of status, of something other than normal; it becomes a kind of logic that gets under the skin. She existed in a sort of in-between hybridity, and although she didn’t realise it yet, it made her race fluid and pliable, disrupting ‘normal’, the set boundaries of what it meant to be White or Black, calling attention to their constructed nature. It is because of this in-betweenness that her body was picked and pulled apart until it was unrecognisable to her as her own, as human.

Adulthood

I’m 22. I’m visiting a friend in New York City. At a sub-par comedy gig, a Black male comedian on stage goes after everyone in the crowd. He reaches me, he states ‘You with the Pocahontas braids, We’re grateful for your pigment.’ Later, in a pizza place after a night out, my friend gets into an argument with a Black man, both of them are slightly drunk. During the argument, which I stay out of due to a fear of confrontation, he turns to me and says, ‘Sister with the big forehead, we’re grateful for your pigment.’ I was horrified by this experience, mainly because it confirmed my fear that I did indeed have a large forehead. Why were those men so fixated on my pigment, why did they focus on my body? Even within my own community, I’m confined to my skin. These are the ones who ask, where are you really from? Value is tied to the motherland, rather than selfhood.  

After leaving home the girl that once stood staring in front of the mirror began to disappear. She now recognised the reflection as her own and it was no longer such a hostile relationship. This does not mean however that society ceased trying to define her. Her adult body was now more pleasing to society’s ideals. It was curvy without being too big, with light brown skin but not so dark that it didn’t fit with society’s beauty standards. Despite being more pleasing she was still not quite human. She was now an object to be used to satisfy male desires and it is within this fetishisation that she felt the least human.

She began to offer herself to men, let them experience her body and the exotic fantasies it promised to deliver. White men asked to smoke a joint and listen to Jazz. They loved the taste of ‘chocolate’ but never stayed long enough to find out what lay within, interested only in her physical being. If she dared to offer them something more, they usually pulled the ‘I’m just not ready for something serious right now’ card.

Present Day

The reflection in the mirror has changed many times. Now, I see myself, just a little older and only a touch wiser. I have my friends within the queer community to thank for reconnecting me with myself. They gave me kinship and an alternative family. It didn’t matter that we didn’t look the same or identify in the same way. What mattered was that we were ‘other’. We aren’t the ‘norm’ and that’s what binds us together and provides us with strength and resilience.

Feeling ‘other’ has affected every aspect of my personality from the way that I dress and how I do my hair to how I interact with different people. The kinships that I formed in my early twenties helped me to deconstruct the aspects of myself that were forming under the pressure of a White Patriarchal society. Being ‘other’ is still an aspect of who I am, and I still have to operate within the society that worked to make me feel less than human. But now I feel a sense of pride and strength in the fact that the hybrid nature of the identity that society imposes on me does not make me normal, which has helped me to define myself, for myself.

I was once asked to define what home meant to me. I thought about my friends, my kin and how my home existed within their bodies. Just like how signifiers of ‘other’ can manifest in the body, home can be there too. It doesn’t belong to a particular space or place. It belongs to the people I will meet, the love that I will find and the family and kinships that I will create.