Interracial Friendships: how can I fit in with other races?

When you look at the picture of me and my closest college friends, one thing really stands out about us: we’re diverse. We’ve almost covered all of the overarching ethnic groups including African American, Latino, Caucasian, and Asian.

My whole life, my friendships have been that way, and I’m lucky to say that I have friends from all sorts of ethnicities, mixes, and countries from around the world.

(Here comes the big but)…BUT, what’s interesting is that in friendships, kind of like romantic relationships, people tend to gravitate towards the familiar, and in many cases, race is the familiarity.

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, many multiracial children, “may develop a public identity with the "minority" race, while maintaining a private interracial identity with family and friends.” Now I can’t attest to that specific example, but I also cannot tell a lie: I act differently depending on what race I am hanging out with.

In front of my white friends, I don’t use as much slang, I don’t talk about the latest rap album to have dropped last week, and I freely discuss books and politics. On the flip side, when I hang out with black people, I spit the urban dictionary like I’ve memorized it, hair is always a hot topic to discuss, and we always end up cracking up about crazy family reunion stories.

But in both cases, I am not myself. I cannot be myself, or at least I don’t feel comfortable being myself. It almost feels as if I live two distinct lives that can never cross paths or else either side will know I’ve been partly faking it all my life.

Spanish and mixed: best friends

Since I am mixed, I can relate with both sides I am mixed with. I was raised by a black man and a white European mother so to interact with both of those groups of people is pretty easy for me now. But it feels as if those relationships can only go so far because there’s a level of understanding that is not met on either side.

For this I have no solution. I’m still figuring this one out. But I’ve realized that I am most happy when I am completely myself despite what race I surround myself with. That’s why I feel so comfortable around my closest friends. Race doesn’t get in the way of us having a close friendship.

And like Katt Williams says, you need your white friends, you need your black friends, and you need your Spanish friends. Even though he’s just joking around, he makes a great point: we need friendship with people outside of our own race because that friendship enriches our lives and teaches us so much more than what we can learn just by judging other races ourselves.

To see an example of a “lack of understanding” between two races, check out Dave Chappelle’s schpeal here (forward to 3:15) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2GqRTgi5WI

What Are You?

Do you remember the day you realized you were mixed? Not white but not completely black either? Maybe someone pointed out that you weren’t Asian enough or made fun of you for not liking tacos since you were only half Mexican?

Mixed people all over the world have to face the category issue at some point in their lives—an issue many others who identify as a single race do not have to address at all. All of us have our own identity stories and remember the moment when we had to face the fact: I am mixed.

I sat down on the couch with my mother, and before I knew it, through my tears and sobs, I told my mom that I hated myself. I had finally expressed, out loud, the tormenting feelings I had harbored inside for the past two years. Not knowing what to say, she let me cry it out, but from that day on, I began my life-long identity journey to answer the simple question I get asked on a weekly basis: what are you?

And I thought the most compelling three words in the English language were “I love you.”

Many children, like myself, grow up aware that they are not of a single race. Knowing that I was not one or the other but rather one and the other, I went back and forth between my two identities, trying each on with different people, seeing which persona fit best, like a coat or a pair of shoes.

Since that didn’t work out too well, it came to a point where I felt like I had to choose white or black, and essentially, mom or dad. That is a choice no child can make or should have to make just because society has a categorization issue—a society that likes to peg, ostracize, segregate, and separate people based on race and ethnicity.

A lot of mixed people end up choosing one side or the other. That’s fairly common especially if your physical features favor one ethnicity over the other. Others altogether reject society’s categories since it has never provided the right ones for them. Only since 2000 could people mark more than one box on the national census, and because of that shift, 7.3 million people identified as more than one race. Also, 41 percent of those people who identified as more than one race were under the age 18.

There are so many issues when it comes to identification, and some people—ignorant people—make others choose between their races for whatever reason. But despite all odds, choosing for yourself, loving yourself, and feeling comfortable being you in your own skin are the only things that matter.

No matter what race you identify as, check out this song by Murs and the 9th Wonder titled "Dark Skinned White Girl" (my favorite verse is the last one)


Murs-Dark Skinned White Girl by shellyp32