One of the keys to being confident in yourself is to have some sort of idea on what your identity is in the big social world. Knowing who you are, who you fit in with, and what cultures you truly feel at home with. Maybe I am a special case, but I have never truly felt like I have belonged in any culture just right. Being mixed is not a bad thing at all, there are plenty of people in the world who seem to be able to take the best from both worlds, but I never seemed able to do that.
Being born in a city and then moving out to the country at the age of 10 really confused me on what culture I belonged in. The black culture of which I never really got in touch with was mocked and called ghetto by those around me, making me frightened of that possible side of me. I was already judged for my skin color, why would I want to be judged by who I may be inside? I tried to distance myself from what all my peers deemed ghetto, but then a new problem would arise that would finally make me confront the issue. They started to tell me I was the whitest black person they know, which at first didn’t bother me, but something just always felt weird about it. Then I started to think about what that really meant. They always said that when I was being polite, when I dressed nicely, or when I was involved in theatre. I’m sure not all of them were trying to be offensive, but the “compliments” they were giving me were backhanded.
Finally, one day someone in my school said it again to me, and I finally snapped inside. Are they trying to say that black people can’t be polite? They can’t like to dress nicely? They can’t be involved in theatre? I know that they didn’t all mean that black people couldn’t be those things, but if I ever questioned one of them about what they mean that’s pretty much what they end up saying. “Well you know how they can be," sure, but I’ve seen just as many white people who act uncultured. No one group can have a monopoly on the ghetto community.
It's funny, I am 50 percent black and 50 percent white, and yet no one ever mentions the white side first. Never mixed, just black, and apparently that means I have to represent every black stereotype under the sun. I don’t resent my black side at all, though, if anything over time I have come to love it even more. I started to delve a little bit more into my black culture, and get more into the music and fashion. By accepting both sides of me, I do feel like I have found a missing part of me that I was truly holding back. I still don’t fit into either culture perfectly, but maybe over time it’ll get easier. Or maybe just due to who I am, I never will. I’m just happy now that I am being myself and not letting others decide on who and what I want to be.
