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black and white



**********PARTS OF THIS WERE ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 2016



I am biracial.

In times like these, I feel trapped, caught between the rock of being white and the hard place of being black.

I could write for a very long time about the horrors of racism that my family members, that my friends, have endured because of their skin color. I could cry and tell you of the suffering that I have been through, as recently as this month, because of my mixed heritage. I could paint a gruesome picture depicting the ugly side of this mess that most of America would prefer to slide under the ever present rug of denial and disbelief.

I won't.

This very post had a different slant when I first wrote it four years ago. I didn't want the country we came from, or the culture we were raised in, or the color of our skin to matter. I wanted desperately to look past that into "one big melting pot of beautiful completeness." Yes, those were my words.

That was the me of then. and that's okay. The me of today no longer wants to wistfully have us all share some kind of blendedness, naively singing kumbaya while we wear colorblind glasses and pretend all will be fine because all  lives  matter.

I want us to know and accept our cultural and racial differences. I want us to embrace what our outsides look like as much as how our insides make us. I want to see  your skin and I want you to see  mine. really see. And then, I want us to accept what we see, accept that we are all uniquely beautiful, just  as  we  are,  not because once we are all in that big melting pot we are somehow better,  but because we are all good now, like we are, black and white and every shade and every difference in between. Let's stop pretending that we have to share any similarities in order to link arms in unity.

That is what the me of today is embracing, our ability to be proud as who we are, without changing one thing to make ourselves "more" of anything. I stand in my own beautiful completeness beside those who stand in their own beautiful completeness, and we are not getting into a damn pot in order to make others more comfortable with our differences. We won't dissolve our individuality into some acceptable blend, losing the very traits that make us best suited for our lives. We are going to proudly display them, our coats of many colors, and love one another, not despite our differences but because of our differences. 












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