The Skin I'm In

Photos by Andrew Johnson and provided by Maya Meade

Maya Meade

It has taken me all 18 years of my life to figure out what the strange feeling in the pit of my stomach is. Over time, I have learned a lot about how that feeling started, how it transformed and why it will likely never go away.

When I was younger, I never knew who I belonged to or what group I was a part of. My mom is white and my dad is black, and I am left hovering somewhere in the middle in a place called mixed. I was raised by my mom’s side of the family, so I associated more with white culture, but I would look down at the color of my arms and know that I wasn’t like my mom. I wasn’t like my grandma. I wasn’t like my grandpa. I wasn’t like any of my loved ones. I was an outsider in my own home. My mother’s past sexual relations with a black man made the rest of my family members visibly uneasy. They never did anything intentionally to hurt me, but their racist comments at family gatherings about the U.S. having a black president or “the illegals that live next door” made me feel like an intruder. With a caramel complexion, I would never completely be one of them.

On the rare occasion that I would visit my father and his family, I was aware of the striking difference in our appearances. With their darker skintones and darker, tighter curls on their heads, I thought they were “real black people.” Of course, I didn’t even know what that meant at 4 or 5 years old, but I knew I wasn’t the same as them. However, I noticed a few similarities in our bodies that I didn’t share with my maternal relatives, like the dry patches on my elbows and kneecaps and my natural curls.

My mother did her best to tame my unruly hair as a young girl with the proper products and combs. She attempted styles that would make me feel like I fit in with my black classmates in grade school. However, I sensed she was often embarrassed by her failure as a white woman to care for my black hair.

Black and white in terms of race is not clear cut. As a biracial child, I never knew what the right thing to do was, who to impress or what my values should be. Those feelings never went away. I carried those thoughts from primary school to my freshman year of college. Beginning adulthood, I thought some things would change. I hoped I would suddenly know how to function in society as a mixed person and I would suddenly fit in somewhere.

As I consumed myself with those thoughts, I realized there are different ways to look at what being mixed means and how people define it. Someone can be culturally mixed, socially mixed or racially mixed. The ideas people have about me as a mixed person have come from all of those realms of the mixed identity. I have frequently found myself in situations where I am “too black to be white or too white to be black.” In school, that meant the color of my skin was too dark to not be the person people turned to when we talked about slavery in class, but was still light enough for people to treat me with respect during such discussions. As I matured, I realized that those phrases people used to describe me were based only on stereotypical images of race. They were ignorant to the impact of their statements.

My diverse upbringing gave me an insight to the intersectionality of my identity. I understand the privileges I have from being raised primarily by my mother’s upper middle-class family and the oppression I experience because of my race and gender. I no longer see being mixed as a burden, but as a way to explore my background from many sides. It has been a long journey to acceptance, but I realize now that I do not have to choose between being black or white. Now, I embrace the fact that I am half of both.