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My skin is light, but my curls reveal my Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means I cannot easily check off one box or another. And I’m not alone — the number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.
I am too Black to be white and too white to be Black..
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “mulatto,” as many of my friends were, it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents.
A white guy came up to me in the bar and tapped my shoulder. He didn’t greet me before asking, “Are you half white, half Black?”
Then: “I love mulattos,” he said, before doubling down and going even further, saying in vulgar sexual terms what he’d love to do to “a mulatto.”
I felt like I was being mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.
This was a deliberate act of racism, meant to provoke me and my biracial friend, whom he pointed at while repeating the slur.
I’m aware that racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding. But hearing it from people my age, Gen Z, is disorienting. Knowing they find humor in it is deeply unsettling.
“In the current political moment, I think we’re really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,” Morning said.
Whether he knew it or not, that guy’s crude comment echoed a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper-sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them.
“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood
Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people,” a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.
Race is a political and social classification system, she said, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”
My white mother is a likely descendant of colonizers, her ancestors being English and Irish. My Black father is a descendant of slaves. I am both.
My relationship with my mom was on the verge of collapse in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was murdered 10 minutes from my high school. We had spent the previous four years failing to understand each other.
But as I was leaving for college, I realized I needed her. The relationship between a mother and daughter is invaluable and irreplaceable.
I now understand that the deepest divide in this country is not one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals.
It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other.
Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.
I know my mom has no hatred for any group of people, and I love her dearly.
But racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned.
Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.
The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.
