I’m Biracial, But Rejected My Blackness For Years. Here’s Why I Stopped Passing For White.Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Canada, Media Archive, Passing on 2022-03-29 18:32Z by Steven |
I’m Biracial, But Rejected My Blackness For Years. Here’s Why I Stopped Passing For White.
The Huffington Post
2022-03-24
Eleanor Beaton, Guest Writer
“Unknowingly, I started to reject all of the parts of myself that were Black.”
The school bus screeched to a halt. My mother, a Black Fijian woman who proudly embraced her natural ’fro, was waiting for me at the bus stop.
“Bye, n***a,” another kid said loudly, as I got up from my seat.
As an adult, due to my mixed heritage, many people describe me as “white-appearing” or racially ambiguous. But in Nova Scotia in the 1980s — with my tanned skin and thick curly hair in a sea of whiteness — I was reminded on a daily basis that I was different. I was an other. No matter how hard I tried, I would never blend in.
I asked my white father to fetch me from the bus stop going forward…
Read the entire article here.