Identity causes alienation 

I am something not a lot of people are. 

By: Marlie Nelson

Why is my blackness always questioned? 

Being judged based on your looks is not a unique experience. I wish people were just treated as humans by one another and that your appearance was seen as just an accessory. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. 

I am only 25% black, with white passing siblings and an absent African American father. It's like I was given the identity crisis starter pack. My mother raised me right and always educated me on black culture. She made sure I knew how to do my hair, watched all the culturally significant movies, and kept me musically educated. So I knew I didn’t fit into the “black girls who clearly have white mothers” stereotype. 

But, when I step outside my house, I’m no longer my own person. We are all the ideas everyone else has created of us. It feels like I have to try to prove my blackness a little more through my fashion and the way I do my hair. Now don't get me wrong, I love fashion and fresh hairstyles, but I just have the pressure to be a little more than everyone else so the questions about “what I am” can be kept to a minimum. 

My mother has done a good job at making sure I am confident with who I am, but it can be hard when you are at Walmart and people give you weird stares because there's a tan girl with butterfly locs in her hair walking around with a white woman. It’s like nobody has ever seen mixed race children before! Or when you're getting picked up from school and your father has to prove to staff that my siblings are his, since they are white passing and he's black. Or when you're sitting with your friends, and they find out how black you really are and now the room is having a debate on whether or not you can say the N word. Or when you're in a room with other dark skinned people and they assume you think you're better than them because of deep-rooted colorism that lighter skinned people display onto them. 

Everybody has unconscious biases. According to the University of California, San Francisco, unconscious biases are “social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness.”  It is almost normalized, and goes completely unnoticed. 

My friends like to call me an “undercover weird girl,” because my looks don’t match my personality, as if there is a specific way to look based on the way you act. That is an unconscious bias. Have you ever noticed how when a girl is socially unattractive or non threatening looking, she goes unnoticed? Now I don't want to gas myself up, but not only am I pretty with great fashion and style; I have confidence. Now a confident black girl who is very expressive with clothing and hair and a RBF… I am now seen as a challenging young woman. I am assumed to be mean, uptight, sassy, intimidating, and unapproachable. I find that people enjoy staring at me. Now, these stares range from curiosity and admiration to jealousy and judgement. I have become so used to it that I no longer notice, but my mother and boyfriend always recognize when other people's eyes are on me. 

I know all this sounds conceded, like it must be sooo hard being pretty to look at, but at the end of the day, I just want to be left alone. I don’t want to be an idea inside of anyone's head; I just want to be me. I don't want people to be surprised when I speak because they thought I would use different slang or that I wouldn’t know a specific online meme that's trending. I just want to be accepted as I am. 

At the end of the day, if I was a white girl saying she loves Olivia Rodrigo, nobody would bat an eye. If I was a boy spitting out brain rot memes, it would be normal. But instead, I fit into the “Hot Cheeto Girl” aesthetic, liking “white girl music” and having a socially controversial humor that isn’t really the normal mix. That  does not help with causing an identity crisis for a teenage girl. I am me. I will always be me. 

It is important not to lose your identity trying to be what others want you to be, because trust me, it's a very easy problem to fall into. You wonder all the time why you're not like anyone else you see around you, and you start to think it's a bad thing. In reality, that’s  how it is supposed to be. I wish someone had told me this before, which is why I am saying it now. Anybody who is spending time judging you for being who you are is losing in life, and that is okay. Because you’re not. You’re simply being you, and you’re winning.