Growing Up Biracial

Growing up biracial was never a simple task to bear, in fact it sucked half the time and the other half I grew to embrace the beauty behind it.

My mother is white/caucasion and of Italian descent. My grandmother side of the family is pretty mixed (which is where I get the multi-race thing from) they were welch, italian, and dutch. My grandma did have some american indian in her, while my grandpa side was mainly all bloody Italians.

Just to share my ethnic background, I am probably the most mixed racial human in the history of mankind. The sole reason for my skin color is because of my dad, who was absent most of my life before he passed in the fall of 2013. He was African American and Native American. So I got most of his DNA.

I primarily was brought up in a white family, my mom, brother and grandma and sometimes my uncles occassionally. So I was conditioned to certain foods, televsion shows, apparrel and living in a white neighborhood where I wasn't exposed to alot of melinated people like myself. I didn't see my dad at all really, so there was no way I can be under his learning tree and absorb knowledge from him. I gained most of my ethnic roots from my mom and grandmother.

One of the hardest things I had to go through as a biracial adolescent was the rejection and some abandonment issues. I often would feel like the black sheep of my family and life in general, I remember a time when my mom was married to this guy that tried to take the role to be my father but he couldn't perform well in the bedroom to create human life.

My mom felt like she needed a real man to raise up a child, so she cheated...but during the early parts of my childhood, I was introduced to my mother's ex-husbands family who were pretty wealthy. His family was convinced that I was really his son and they were looking forward to finally meeting me. Well that all changed when we made the visit to his mother's house, I was about maybe 4 or 5, I don't remember much about the visit but I did hear some arguing between him and his mother and it was about my skin color.

His family was disappointed that I wasn't really his son and they immediately knew what was up, years later I would know to....and that I wasn't white enough. They told us to leave and that was that. My mom's ex really loved me like I was his own but he had alot of mental health issues and what departed him from my life was brain tumor and the fact that him and my mom were not on good terms, so he moved to Florida with his family and I never saw him again.

My brother and I are blood, no doubt, but we are polar opposites. His father left him too before he was born, we both had different dads so technically that would make us half brothers. Never really saw it that way. I can call back to a time where my brother was the one with all the friends, the cool one. His friends were mainly white and they often wondered why his younger brother looked different from him, I don't think my bro actually explained to them the situation but because of this I was often picked on by them and sometimes he would join in on it. His friends would sometimes make 'black' jokes that lacked real humor to take a indirect dig at me. I often cried when I was being verbally bullied but I wanted to fit in with them so badly cause I wanted real friends too but again, I was rejected.

I felt that my relatives were often distant from me and didn't bother to have a real connection with me, the only real connection I had was with my grandma, we spent the most time together, reading the bible, cooking, watching family shows and walking outside. I would make a few friends in elementary school that had ethnic bakckgrounds such as hispanic, chinese, indian and nigerian. I realized as I got older I had a harder time making friends and connections with black and white, I know, odd.

Growing up a biracial got more difficult once I started middle school and left my friends I had worked so hard to make and when I felt like I was gaining respect and acceptance of my academic life but got the rug pulled out from underneath me when I moved to a new district. Everything in my life around this time, went dark on me. It was a combination of family division, abusive step dad on drugs, adapting to a new school environment and getting bullied in my social circle.

This middle school I went to did not believe in diversity, it was jumbled with mostly blacks/african americans and a few percentage of spanish speaking students. There was no other race, and I'm new to the school, judging by the atomsphere it seemed very tight knit. Like everybody knew someone, no one seemed left out or out of place when I was eyeing the field of kids before class started. Immediately when I first walked in to class, I knew I was the odd man out, the outcast if you will. I was judged from the jump, everybody was close to each other and everybody was like "who the hell is this guy" (really the N word).

Out from the gate the other kids knew I wasn't 100% black like them so they had a hard time accepting me, much like most of my family and neighborhood. I was often told "You sound white" and asked all the time " Is you black?" Honestly to me it doesn't matter if I'm both white and black, I just wanted to come to school and do fun things, get all As and be myself but the problem was I didn't know myself. I also had developed social anxiety so I couldn't have fun or feel proud cause I was getting good grades due to the class being jealous of me and feeling some type of way about me.

All the things that were considered cool that the black kids were doing, like drinking, turning up at parties, smoking weed and having sex pretty young, I wasn't indulging in that so to them I wasn't able to hang or fit in with them. Because I wasn't fighting or cussing teachers out on a daily, I was nothing to them. Because I wasn't trying to talk to a billion girls all at once, I was nothing to them.

The friends I had outside of school were no better, but they were my only shot of truly fitting in and I was desperate for a social life cause my family life and school life was falling short. At that point I had no set of standards so I was just settling for fake friendships all the time. The company I was keeping, it led me to switch up my character a bit, I was talking more slang, listening to alot of heavy rap music, staying late out and cutting school at one point. All because I was hanging out with 100% black people that grew up in the hood, it sounds ridiculous but I had to embrace this side of my false character and prove I could be like the brothers and sisters.

This was potentially leading me down a destructive path and before it got crazy for me; my mom knew the friends I was keeping were a bad influence on me, they wanted me to do the things they were doing and when they realized I wasn't about that gang groupie mentality or how they wanted to live, I was nothing to them cause I wasn't duplicating the same attitude and same behavior.

There was a time when people thought my mom wasn't my mom, due to us being a different skin color. It never mattered to both of us, my mother loves me unconditionally because she brought me into this world and gave me life. If you grew up as a biracial and felt like you never did fit in with blacks or whites, I feel you. Unfortunately for me I was around alot of people who did not accept me for my uniquness of ethnicity but as a 24 year old, I embrace the hell out of it.

I don't conform to any minority labeling, and its a shame in this day in age racism or partial racism is still happening. I got sick and tired of not being good enough for other people cause 'I don't dress professionally in suits for interviews when a white man is asking me a bunch of questions and decide they can't hire someone of my skin complextion.' I became so over with black people not befriending or accepting me because I didn't grow up in the hood or wasn't talking slang like them.

The fact is I grew up with my own set of struggles and obstacles to overcome in life, being mixed and going through society along with one-sided races was challenging for me. Everybody stuck together and had each others back while I had to watch my own back from all different angles cause it felt like I was just on the wrong side of the coin for the most part.

At the end of the day, this is not a sob story of my life, this is only to share my experiences with being multied-raced. If you had this similar experience I encourage you to be your best self no matter if nobody accepted you or not. Nobody gets to determine your value based off you're unusual ethnic background, if people can't look past that, then they are simply ignorant and you need to keep your distance from those people that try to alienate you based off you being bi-racial, believe it or not thats another form of racism.

The positive side of being biracial, it makes you more open to a variety of cultures to explore and definitely can make some beautiful looking babies as well. Focus on obtaining clarity of your unique roots, its something to be proud of not to be shamed of. Take pride in it, and if you still have people that judge you or treat you differently because of that, then that means that person is not right within and they wanna see you live in that hurt. You need to know that you were made the way you were intended to be made, it's not your fault or anybody else's. Embrace it and seek out people who do embrace it as well.