A Question of Belonging: The Reality of Being White-Passing
“You’re not really Black.”
Echoed in the halls of my first-year university residence, in change rooms and in first encounters, those words have been no stranger to me. My loose curls and dark eyes matched with my full lips and olive skin have always drawn unwarranted questions. Not really white. Not really Black. I remain somewhere straddled in between, balancing the privilege of being white-passing with not looking anything like my white, small-town friends. It took me a long time to understand that I was biracial. I suppose that in some ways, ignorance truly is bliss.
I was on the cusp of adulthood when I realized how divided I truly felt between two cultures: one where I never felt completely accepted and one I had never been exposed to. I had the privilege of growing up in a small town in the early 2000s with little regard for my own identity. Surrounded by my father’s white family, it has taken me a long time to understand that the music, friends and school with which I grew up also restricted my understanding of who I was.
My mother’s childhood tales were limited to intangible accounts of the real taste of mangos and family history carved into the edges of old wooden tables. The accent that resurfaced as she spoke to friends from the island and her exuberant Black hairdresser were all I knew of Trinidad. My Black heritage was never anything more than a place I’d never seen, people I’d never known and a culture I’d never understood.
My mother and grandmother had their reasons for leaving and never going back. But as their wrinkles deepened, I began to wonder about the life they had lived before calling Canada home. I wondered how the constant warm air would feel on my winter-worn skin and what the front of my great-grandmother’s home looked like perched on the west side of the island.
Being white-passing has awarded me privileges that I’ll never fully understand: the stereotypes and stigma I never had to be worried about and the health care that was always provided by someone who at least sort of looked like me. I can straighten the curls out of my hair with relative ease and find my shade of makeup in any drugstore aisle. I was never pulled aside going through airport security or followed around a clothing store.
However, the same privileges that I have as a white-passing biracial also leave me on the outskirts of both races. White people know that I’m not entirely like them and Black people often don’t believe I’m mixed at all. In Ottawa, I was discouraged from joining a Black Student Association, being told by a person of colour that my appearance wouldn’t be accepted amongst my peers. I became anxious applying for scholarships offered to students of colour and avoided checking the ethnicity box on any application. There are days when I feel like an imposter for revealing my Black heritage when my skin doesn’t show it. Without question, it is and always has been easier to be white.
It begs the question about what being Black truly means. The colour of your skin? The knowledge of your ancestry? I didn’t know. I still don’t. The reality is that I grew up submersed in white culture and have never felt Black. The scar over my mother’s eyebrow and the way people look to me when my grandmother’s accent becomes too difficult to understand are reminders of the prejudice that brushes by me but never truly lands.
As a result, I remain an outcast of both cultures. A creation of two worlds; an internal struggle between the two shades of me. The collision of worlds inside of me does not have to mean that I must choose one or the other. The reality is that I am both: a beloved daughter of a Black woman whose ambition and drive seeps into every aspect of her work, and the heart of a white man whose charisma carried him farther than academia ever could. In this chaos of a world, saturated with divide and hierarchy, it is the responsibility of biracial, white and BIPOC individuals to become educated about one another.
It’s easy to be indifferent. To fall into a state of detachment and deprive ourselves of the emotional intelligence and empathy that make us uniquely human. To remain on the margins of injustice is to be compliant with that injustice. The privilege of being impartial should neither be granted nor accepted by anyone. To combat ignorance, we must first admit our own.
Take the time to become introspective. To understand your faults and biases. Invest time in unlearning and re-learning, growing and evolving. We are nothing without the knowledge we seek and the ideas of others. We are nothing without the acknowledgement of our flaws and the desire to correct them. The pursuit of greater knowledge is both a choice and a privilege.
It is a constant fight to break the boundaries of what people perceive me to be. To gain insight into my white-passing privilege and the struggle of identity shared by others like me. And when people presume whiteness, I am proud to say that I really am Black too.
