The problem is . . . . . . . . . . .

Mixed race? Biracial? Multiracial?

Isn’t that a problem for you? Wasn’t it confusing? Hard?

It was because it wasn’t that I was multiracial or biracial or mixed.

It was because other people were confused, making it hard, making it a problem.

Wow! You’re the United Nations!

Please. Is that all your frame of mind can construct?

Often, when people think of people, or even approach people, or perceive people before there is any interaction at all, there is an investment, an automatic clicking that goes on in the mind that orders the so-called “mixed” person along the lines of two or three, or four, or more races, nationalities, ethnicities.  It is a problem because it is assumed that these are “parts” or non-whole, aspects of this and that.  A smorgasborg, a buffet.  But it’s not quite gourmet, not real, incomplete, a hodge-podge, muzzled, confusing, IMPURE.

The mixed place is a space and way of being that is not parts of any whole.  Hell, the races themselves are not “whole.”  The names of the races, ethnicities, were made in order to communicate something.  After racial politics, oppression and domination and repression and assimilation, new identities were formed in history, according to the place and politics of the people. Changing. Staying. A combination.

So approach me, and others like me, as me.  Not pre-formed in your mind.  We are diverse.  Some of us are quite assimilated.  Some of us ignore.  Some of us take to heart and make it some kind of soul that is immovable.  Some of us move and change and shift.  Some of us are contextual.  Some of us don’t have to think about it because we are privileged and/or oblivious or escapist.  Some of us HAVE TO think about it because we arrive into incidents, moments, locations and places that MAKE US confront the mono-cultural, mono-racial, singular and pure identities that want to make the whole world singular and simple and pure.  So it is jarring. It is difficult.

See us there.