Growing Up Biracial: It's Not All Black and White

How a constant identity crisis makes growing up harder than ever before.

Bacalao or roasted ham. Red rice and black beans or white bean chicken chili. The infamous tight-lipped, half-smile, half-nod greeting versus a kiss on each cheek to every person in the room. The constant chatter among the thirty-some people versus the calm conversation between ten. These differences are the ones that I’ve grown up with and have attempted to justify for myself, my siblings, and all those who have grown up split between two, three, or more cultures.

From a young age, I’ve always known that my Christmas Eves were different from those of my friends. I heard stories of going to church, eating roasted ham, visiting sides of the family that may live farther away. For my siblings and I, we get both versions of Christmas. On the 24th, we gather with all thirty of aunts, uncles, cousins and second-cousins in my grandmother’s townhouse that seems to grow smaller every year, and immediately ask when dinner will be ready, knowing that we’d probably only eat rice and black beans with bread because none of us like the cod soup dish called bacalao we eat every year. The younger kids go upstairs to pile on my grandma’s queen sized bed and play with random trinkets she’s collected from across the world, while the adults eat the only cold Latin appetizers they could think of downstairs. On the 25th, we dress up nicely in semi-matching outfits and watch as our two younger cousins rip open their ten gifts each, while we get our envelopes with checks written out inside our cards.

In the beginning, I never questioned why my two families differed so much from one another. Never wondered why I felt that I looked too dark on my dad’s side and too light on my mom’s side. Why I understood what my dad’s side was saying, but could barely keep up with the language on my mom’s side. However, as I grew up, I began to ask these exact questions: why did I feel like I was being pulled in two different directions? Why would I get the question, “What are you?” more often that you could imagine? What am I?

Racial Awareness

As research has shown, most, “young children are essentially unaware of race distinctions” (Nuttgens 2010). Children don’t understand the emphasis that society places on physiognomy–figuring out where someone is from based solely on physical attributes. Before continuing, however, it’s important to explain why race in itself is entirely a racial construct; as cited in The Social Construction of Race: Biracial Identity and Vulnerability to Stereotypes by Margaret Shih from University of Michigan among other contributors, “there is greater variance in terms of traits and abilities within racial groups than between racial groups (Harris & Sim 2002). There is no single characteristic that belongs exclusively to individuals in one racial group and not to an individual in another racial group (Zack 1995)” (2007). In other words, there’s no biological proof that the color of our skin determines specific traits; there’s no evidence of our skin tone making some of us smarter and others of us more athletic.

It isn’t until biracial kids grow up that they begin to really understand the weight of stereotypes and experience their own racial identity issues: feelings of being split in two, pressure from outside forces to choose one racial identity over another, etc (Nuttgens 2010). Like so many other biracial kids, my middle-school-aged self felt it necessary to pick one side or the other. How could I possibly be “Mexican enough” if I was white-passing? How can I validify my anger for what happened to my ancestors and stand up for the struggles of Latinx people if the other half of me is the reason my Latin ancestors suffered? A friend of mine, Calista, had similar feelings. As a nineteen-year-old, half-White, half-Dominican woman, her experiences in some ways mirror my own, but in other ways, completely differ. When asked whether or not she ever felt like she had to pick either her white side or her Dominican side, she replied, “Of course. I don’t know who wouldn’t when the two [sides] are so different from one another.” Another interviewee, Nia, half-White, half-Senegalese, completely agrees. Stating that it was during her adolescence when she began feeling split in two, and she doesn’t “remember a time where [she] didn’t feel this way.”

Racial Identity

This growing internal desire to choose between our two racial identities stems from the American society’s need to categorize us into tiny little checkboxes to fulfill a greater political agenda. The United States has always wanted to divide their citizens into boxes based on their background–really, though, based on the color of their skin. For many years, multiracial people with black heritage would identify as black, due to the internalized “one-drop-rule” that was at one point codified in American law (Roth 2005). Wendy Roth, author of The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages (2005), working in the department of sociology at Harvard University, goes on to explain, “it is important to understand their racial identification on a national level, both to accurately estimate and make projections about the Black population in the United States and to evaluate the continued significance of the one-drop rule on identity choices.” At one point, and to a certain extent even today, race was seen as something “exclusive” (Roth 2005)–people could only be one.

With a growing multiracial population, the pre-set boxes have become completely arbitrary. People don’t fit into little checkboxes anymore–they never did. From standardized testing to college applications, individuals are constantly asked to choose what box they’ll be a part of that day. Nia at nineteen-years old, says she hates that she has to pick one side over another, going as far to say, “Sometimes, I’ll be petty and choose ‘other’ as a way to sort of say, ‘You don’t get to determine how I identify myself.’ I don’t think it’s fair.” She wasn’t surprised when I told her the ability to self-identify as ‘biracial’ on the national census wasn’t allowed until 2000 (Roth 2005).

Being forced to self-identify can lead to many negative consequences: namely, poor psychological health. Imagine being forced to pick one side or another, one parent’s traditions over another. Furthermore, many research done on biracial individuals is mostly negative, specifically showing that biracial individuals in general “experience difficulties with gender confusion, self-hatred, alcohol and other drug abuse, suicide, delinquency, alienation, and denial of self, as well as racial self-identity” (Herring 1995).

Moreover, our environment shapes whether or not we pick a racial identity and stick with it, or if we decide to do what’s called “race switching." In other words, because race is entirely a social construct, we have the choice in how we are going to identify ourselves each and every day. For example, in certain situations, it’s easier for me to simply say I’m white, other times to avoid questions I’ll explain that I’m Mexican, most times, though, I’m biracial, bi-ethnic, mixed, whatever word I feel like using that day. In saying that, there’s really no good word to explain people's backgrounds and many people “find [labels such as ‘mixed’] offensive, if not unacademic or inaccurate” (Lin 2019).

As a professor at New York University, Lin introduces the idea of using the term “alloy” as a metaphor for multi-racial/ethnic/cultural individuals. Lin explains her reasoning of coining the term "alloy" by stating that the metaphor, “emphasizes the complex, but unified nature of mixed identity. The metaphor also respects multiple aspects of cultural mixedness (e.g., inter-class or interfaith) in the alloy formation” (2019). Lin is one of many people who find that there isn’t the right terminology for people of multiple backgrounds, and with the growing number of people who have multiple different backgrounds, more discussion needs to be done surrounding the correct and accurate terminology.

However, let’s take a step back. Many biracial individuals find themselves in a similar situation as myself. One in which their race is fluid, changing by the day. Mahogany Swanson, a psychologist studying for her PhD at Georgia State University, cites a study from 2009 stating that individuals who “demonstrated malleable racial identification, or flexibility in how they self-identify in terms of race, also showed poorer psychological health” (2013). Plainly, those of us who are more fluid in their view of their own race are more prone to mental health issues, perhaps the ones previously mentioned. Interestingly, students who attend a majority white school and are in the middle class are more likely to adopt a biracial identity (Swanson 2013). This is the case for myself, Nia and Calista; we all attended a majority white high school and we are all, more or less, in the middle class.

On the other hand, the idea of having a fluid view of race makes for a more diverse and open society. As an example, Dr. Kristin Pauker, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, looks at Hawaii’s unique racial make-up and shows that children who grow up there have a less rigid view of race, similarly college students who move there from mainland United States begin to view race different and more fluidly (Velasquez-Manoff 2017). Because of the multi-cultural society that’s been in Hawaii for years, it makes it difficult to have a rigid view of what race is and what race is not, based on the definitions put forth by the United States.

Children and Race

In his article bluntly titled, Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii, Valesquez-Manoff (2019) talks to a psychology professor, Kristin Pauker, who compares the Hawaiian islands to the suburbs of Boston and finds that, “between ages 4 and 11, upper-middle-class children from mostly white neighborhoods around Boston increasingly viewed race as a permanent condition and expressed stereotypes about other racial groups… These children came from public schools in liberal areas." From personal experience, I’d have to say that most elementary school kids in my mostly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood exhibit stereotypes with other racial groups, much like the ones Manoff mentioned in his opinion piece, “blacks were aggressive or, on the flip side, good at basketball; that Asians were submissive and good at math” (2019). Calista, Nia and the other interviewees agreed that many elementary-aged students exhibited these stereotypes when I asked what they thought.

Dr. Pauker contrasted her findings with children in Hawaii who “tended not to express the same essentialist ideas about race." So, white children in upper-middle class in mostly white neighborhoods show more tendencies towards “essentialist thinking,” or thinking “about human beings’ unchangeable essence, their inherent inferiority or the threat they supposedly pose” (Velasquez-Manoff 2019). In simpler terms, essentialist thinking is the belief that “familiar categories—dogs and cats, space and time, emotions and thoughts—each have an underlying essence that makes them what they are” (Feldman Barrett, 2014). Pauker believes this type of thinking is what makes racism possible and that the children in Boston suburbs demonstrate more essentialist thinking than children in Hawaii due to their environment.

This does not mean that these children are racist, nor does it mean that these children were “deliberately taught these stereotypes at home." These stereotypes have been ingrained in the minds of the entire country; they’ve become rooted in our society. Part of the study titled, The Social Construction of Race: Biracial Identity and Vulnerability to Stereotypes, found that “multiracial participants… were more likely [to] inhibit stereotypes in response to racial salience…” (Shih 2007). In other words, biracial people are less likely to subscribe themselves to certain stereotypes. Pauker’s study as well as Shih’s study show that multicultural individuals engage less with systemic stereotypes than monoracial people. I’d like to believe this is not because they are simply not racist, but rather because they’re exposed to multiple cultures, showing that people in those cultures don’t always perpetuate their given stereotype. Because many multiethnic people grow up in an environment where, “individuals from different racial backgrounds coexist peacefully” (Shih 2007), the likelihood of them perpetuating a stereotype seems to decrease since they can see first-hand that stereotyped people don’t always fulfill their given stereotype. Where does this leave multi-something children who grow up in a situation where their parents are from two different backgrounds but don’t get along, or “coexist peacefully?” How do they see stereotypes, themselves, their parents and their multiple backgrounds?

Colorism… or Lack Thereof

It’s not, not known that the United States among many other countries perpetuates the ideal of the perfect woman: white, blonde, blue-eyes, skinny. But as the US becomes more and more a melting pot, that idea is less realistic–if it ever was in the first place. This idea has affected nearly everyone’s view of themselves, of their peers, their parents, their sexual partners, among so many other relationships. In a study conducted by Molly Silvestrini (2019), she found three main themes: “(1) the impact of racial stereotypes on interracial attraction, (2) the media’s tendency to perpetuate Whiteness as a standard of beauty, and (3) the harmful consequences of sexual racism on students’ self-esteem and self-worth.” In interviewing multiple people from different backgrounds, she concluded that her findings supported previous research on the topic of racial stereotypes, beauty standards and sexual racism.

Silvestrini (2019) noted that, “colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone, is a significant problem and contributes to racial biases… [and] can play a significant role in determining attitudes and attraction towards racial minorities, even within one particular racial group.” She went on to discuss the differences that she found within different parts of society where a lighter-skinned person might have different advantages than a darker-skinned person. However, her remarks had me wondering where multiethnic/racial/cultural people fit into this entire concept. Colorism, as Nia put it when I asked her, “definitely plays a role in every culture, race or ethnicity, but for each one there are different implications.” As a biracial young woman, she has a lot to say about colorism in her own background, stating that it, “almost creates a whole different caste system.”

In my own experience, I feel as though colorism has played a role in my everyday life. On my dad’s side I feel too dark in some situations, but on my mom’s side, it depends on the time of year. There are frequent discussions in my mom’s household surrounding the lack of sun we’ve received, the huge tan that has made our skin tone increase by a certain number of shades in comparison to one another. It’s become a sort of competition within my immediate family, but I don’t think anyone has ever taken the implications of this game of ours seriously.

This is just how ingrained the importance of skin tone has become in our society. Like Nia mentioned, different cultures have different implications for lighter or darker skin tones. Specifically in my family, the darker we become in the summer the more “Mexican” we feel; meanwhile, I know my siblings feel as though they are “less Mexican” the lighter they are in the winter, or if they don’t tan as much as someone else. According to Nia, “for a lot of African countries, skin bleaching is a common practice because even if you only lighten your skin slightly, you are perceived as superior.” Silvestrini (2019), mentions something similar: “European beauty constructs are internalized by the Black community, and that darker skinned women experienced feelings of isolation, resulting in lower self-esteem…” “European beauty” is simple: lighter skin, lighter hair, lighter eyes.

Silvestrini (2019) notes interesting research: there’s no colorism in terms of Whiteness. Once you’re donned white, it doesn’t matter what kind of white: you’re just, white. But what makes someone white? At what point is someone considered, simply, white without people doubting or questioning them? Perhaps in the winter, when I’m “less Mexican” due to my lighter skin-tone, people are more likely to consider me simply white, but I’ve still received questions of where I’m from in the colder months.

Exploitation of Multiracial People

Due to the innate, systematic racism that’s apparent across the United States, the idea of an interracial couple has always been seen as a sort of taboo. This has resulted in an increased fetishization of mixed people and children of mixed couples, while Black and Latina women are hypersexualized. In one of the interviews conducted by Silvestrini (2019), a half-Japanese half-White woman discussed how the constant mention of her race made her feel fetishized. In this same sample of students Silvestrini interviewed, Black and Latina women were among the most common women of color who mentioned that their race and ethnicities were brought up unnecessarily leading to the, “belief that they were fetishezed based on their racial backgrounds” (2019). Instances of sexual partners mentioning that they’ve never done ‘it’ with an Asian girl/biracial girl/Black girl/etc isn’t something uncommon according to a few women in Silvestrini’s (2019) interviews. Further, many partners assume that women with Latin or Black backgrounds are more likely to be willing to put out or they’re “easier” than other women because of the hypersexualized stereotype in the media.

For example, North West, daughter of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West has already received comments on her appearance, “too White” or “too Black” from either side. The rest of the Kardashian-West kids, along with Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner’s babies have received similar comments, all from people admiring their childrens’ physical appearance, their hair, their skin-tone, and more.

As for the overall mixed-baby Instagram pages, how damaging is it for mixed children to see people fawning over children who may or may not look like them? People’s new obsession with multiracial babies has turned into an idea of wanting to create their own “designer baby” with the perfect soft curly, but not to curly hair with big, bright colored eyes. Not all mixed kids look like that. I don’t look like that. Nia doesn’t, Calista doesn’t, my siblings don’t, and in fact, most multiethnic people don’t look like these babies and children that Instagram and other media are fawning over. It’s an unfair expectation to place upon mixed kids to live up to this “designer baby” desire that’s arisen in our society.

I’ve noticed the increase in multiracial couples in advertisements on television, in magazines, online. While this is more representative of the world we live in today, when I asked my interviewees how they felt, Nia said something interesting. She does, in fact, feel represented, only because there are few dark-skinned women casted in big movies or television shows. She mentions, “there are really only two actresses casted when they want a woman of color or someone ‘diverse’ to play the role: Zendaya and Amandla Stenberg. Both of them are light-skinned, mixed girls, like me. I can definitely recognize my privilege when it comes to being represented in the media.” She has an interesting outlook–being biracial has allowed her to feel represented in the media, but what about the biracial kids who have a darker skin tone? Or, the multiracial kids who don’t have specific attributes that pinpoint them to one race ethnicity? What physical attributes even point to someone being from a different background? Hollywood evidently sees no need to portray someone who's darker skin-toned, despite there being tons of people who have a darker skin-tone.

As far as the world has come in terms of "diversity," we clearly have a lot more work to do. Yes, we've abolished the one-drop-rule, industries have claimed themselves more "diverse" and Hollywood occasionally casts a somewhat racially ambiguous person in a movie role, but that doesn't mean that the same need for categorization hasn't been completely ingrained into the minds of people across the United States. The problems in both the fashion industry and Hollywood span decades and in order to fully understand them would take much longer, but it's evident that we really haven't come as far as people like to think. We still see an obsession with race, physiognomy, and defining people by their backgrounds in all levels of society: from the federal government to each individual person's view of the people around them. This need for categorization has made it difficult for those of us who don't easily fit in any of the preset boxes to really understand ourselves or grapple with our dual, or multi-identity.

While this exploration has focused on the inherent issues in the United States, these problems are not solely experienced in American society, but across the world. As we become more connected globally, the opportunities for people to mix cultures, races, ethnicities, has become abundant.

Biracial people, multi-ethnic/racial/cultural people, we exist not solely in the US, but around the world.

I'm not sure at what point we will be able to completely understand our "mixedness;" I don't know if there will ever be a time where the United States can look at someone and not immediately want to identity their background(s). Until then, we can make our own spaces, without the checkboxes.

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