I have always had an interesting relationship with my race.
I am a Black, Mexican, Spanish— my maternal grandmother being from Spain and my maternal grandfather being from Mexico— American and have always identified as such.
My complicated relationship with my race is not derived from a lack of knowing what I am, but rather what others have always perceived me to be.
Ever since I was a child, I have always been told what I am or what I am not because of my race. I have been told that I’m not Mexican because I’m too dark, yet I’m not Black because I’m not dark enough.
I have been told what music I should like, how I should speak, what sports I should or should not be good at.
Even at the age of ten, I realized that people would always have this perception of who I was before I even had the chance to open my mouth and speak for myself just because my skin was of a certain color.
The sad part is, is that I wish I could say that those who judged me were strangers, but even those I considered friends came with their own perceptions.
Once I told a friend that I did not like Rap music; I felt that most of the genre was filled with grotesque lyrics and promoting messages I could not stand behind as a woman. That same "friend" of mine turned to me and said I had to like Rap or else I was not really Black as if the base of my identity lied solely on what music I liked.
I have been given the side-eye when I walked into a liquor store and had my every movement tracked like I was some sort of animal. It did not matter that I had never stolen a thing in my life or that I was a 4.2 student and in the top 5 of my class, all the clerk saw was a "statistic," that I was a Black teenager and therefore out to rob him.
He did not even blink an eye at my best friend, a green-eyed, blonde-haired, white male. At 12, I realized that there was no way to escape the judgment.
So what was I to do?
At 12 years old, your body is already a war of raging hormones and the societal pressures to find your niche in the established social circles, add the weight of this preconceived notion people have of you because of your skin and it is enough to drive a child mad.
It drove me mad.
During elementary, I chose to play the part of what people wanted me to be because it would mean being accepted. You see, people do not want their perceptions to be challenged, especially since it often means that they are wrong, and if you challenge them, many find it easier to shun you instead of admitting the fact that their thinking is flawed.
No one wants to be shunned, especially not a little girl trying to make friends. Yet, at 12 years old I was tired of playing.
I did not want to pretend to like Lil Wayne's newest album or talk a certain way, I wanted to be me: a metal-loving nerd who had a pretentious vocabulary built on reading way too many books. So I chose to isolate myself from the culture and the people who tried to impose it onto me. I stopped talking to friends whom the only thing I had in common with were things of the persona I had created. I threw out my burned CDs filled with the Rap I hated and stopped talking like I was a cheap imitation of 50 cent.
It is not that I believed that there is anything wrong with liking that music or talking that way; it is that it was not me.
I grew up seeing my siblings and peers putting on facades to appease other people and their perceptions and I just did not want to do that anymore. I was tired and so I pushed everything away.
Little did I know my choice was a double-edged sword.
By choosing to isolate myself, I not only allowed myself room to grow into my own identity, I ended up robbing myself of an experience. At 20 years old, I know very little of Black culture. I am not talking about knowing the history of my people— I spent many hours both as a child and as an adult reading about what my people have accomplished— but rather the finer nuances of Black culture that cannot be learned from a book. I am talking about the family gatherings in the summer filled with good foods and quick-witted conversations. I am talking about gossiping with your hairdresser for hours on end and the quick-forming bonds you make with others within your community. I had very little exposure to that and by my own hand. At times, it is lonely because I feel as if I will never truly be able to fit in with that community anymore. I do not know what it means to be Black in the same sense that the rest of the community knows. Yet, at the same time, I am grateful for that.I am comfortable in my own skin and have a grasp on who I am as a person, what my goals are and what traits I lack. I have found people who are willing to work past any perceptions they may have had because of my skin and take the time to get to know the real me. I am eternally grateful because more often than not, people get lost in the noise of others telling them what they should and should not be.
I do not know how to be Black, I know how to be me.
