Skip to main content

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. 












Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

and the honor goes to...part 1

This will be a series of posts in which I honor people who have made an impact in my life, both in my past and in my present. I am blessed to still have some of these people in my life; others have left this life for their next one; others are no longer a part of my close circle, yet still made a difference to me. I want to share them with you. I want to honor them. I want them to know how much I love and respect them. The first one is dedicated to my childhood babysitter, Pat B. Growing up, both of my parents worked. This meant that my sister and I went to a babysitter when we were younger. We had a few, but the one that we spent the most time with, and that I remember the most, lived right up the road from us. We were actually neighbors, but being in the country, that meant a cornfield separated us. I recall being there when I was in kindergarten until I was old enough to stay by myself, probably around 12 or 13. I love to reminisce about my time there. It was my home away from ...
5 comments
Read more

no more hiding

I first published this in May of 2013. A lot has changed in that time. A lot has stayed the same. There are updates at the end of this post. One of my daughters is on a daily SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) or, in layman's terms, an antidepressant. She was diagnosed with the main dish of Anxiety Disorder, with a side of depression. I can joke about it now - and she can too - but it hasn't always been that way. . We first encountered it years ago. At the time we sought church-based counseling but nothing else in the way of help for her. She was so young that I just couldn't imagine putting her on a medication. I had a hard time even accepting that she might have a mental disorder. We got through that time - barely - and went on without it rearing its head again. But when it resurfaced three years ago, it did so with a vengeance. This time, I was better equipped myself to deal with it. There was no hesitation. We immediately saw a doctor, got a prescrip...
2 comments
Read more

the gift of covid-19

" But there never seems to be enough time To do the things you want to do Once you find them..."     ~ Time In A Bottle by Jim Croce Time. How many of us would wish for more time? I would. At the end of many days, I wish that I had just a few more hours, or one more day, or to somehow stop the world from spinning by so quickly so that I could accomplish more, do more, be more. But, it doesn't work that way. We are all given the exact same minutes in a day to decide what is important, who and what holds our attentions, our hearts. If, at the end of today, I am wishing for more time, it is because I chose to mismanage the gift of time that I have already received. I found out Friday that my job would be on a 2 week break due to the corona virus. I am an aide/occasional driver on a school van. It takes less than 4 hours out of my day, but my mind started immediate calculations about how I could spend these extra minutes. I spent wasted time dreaming about sl...
1 comment
Read more