It’s not easy being a person of color in America.
Bluntly, it is one of the most difficult existences possible. Furthermore, being a millennial, we are at a pivotal point in history. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents fought for better times for us, only to grow old and see that America’s disdain for people of color has been engrained in the system. They fought as hard as they could, only for the battle to become internal. We are alive to see the widespread of technology. I was alive to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to tweet tips on how to combat tear gas, to those in Ferguson, Missouri during the riots after Michael Brown’s shooting. I’m alive to see the Student Body President and Student Body Vice President of my University (Go Shocks!) serve as true testaments of changing times, only later for our VP to be attacked by a Trump supporter, near the corner of campus.
We live in times where the majority is no longer the majority, but still in power. And under this power, people are categorized by the race they look like.
The only sure place we can see positive representation of minorities is when they have conformed to white standards of normalcy, and then, I’m still not sure. I’m not a fan of respectability politics – the illusion that marginalized groups can align their ideologies with the mainstream values to be ‘accepted’. It’s a lie, because at the point, you are just seen as the ‘exceptional one of your kind’. It is still not enough to be seen as person.
So that presents another problem for people like me – to carry these weights of the different groups that fought for me to be here. I am African – American and Mexican, living in Kansas, and it is the most awkward experience of my life. Within these two groups, there are a lot of similarities, and a lot of differences. They are not the same, and that is the beauty of different cultures. Regardless of what I look like, I am always the sum of two different groups, with their biases and there cultures.
Whereas many others can lie about who they are, us Biracial people do not have to. We can pick and choose if we want. And that’s a lot of power in oppression to have.
It’s hard to go to the grocery store, and have someone stop you and ask you, “What are you?” At the onset, I want to be funny, “I don’t know, some days I feel like a mermaid, somedays I feel like a human being”, but I know this isn’t what they are asking me.
Sadly, I’m not a mermaid, and they are aren’t asking me if I feel like I’m some other creature. They are asking me, “What is your race, so I can know how to treat you?”
They are asking me who I identify as, so they can know how to judge me, how to treat me, based on factors out of my control.
And unlike many other people, I have the power to choose one of the two races inside of me. Do I want to be Mexican today? Do I want to be Black today? Which type of oppression do I choose today? What is going on in the news? Did Trump say something racist yet again, or did Obama piss off the Republicans again? What are the personal implications of my words?
I don’t want to be ‘mixed’ – I’m not a dog, I’m not a lab experiment. I’m a person, and I living in two different types of worlds all of the time. I never know who I am and everyone is always trying to fill in the blanks. I live in this consistent battle of trying to make sense of what it means to be for me, of what it means to take diversity to a different path. I’m battling family with views about my other culture, I’m battling the views of Black side for talking about ‘illegals’, and I’m battling the racist views of my Mexican side for being anti-Black Lives Matter, or saying the word that is not their word!
I am in an omnipresent battle, and I don’t think there can be a winner.
