Monday, June 28, 2010

Bi-racial, PT.2

Growing up I was called all kinds of racial slurs. Everything from 'Nigger', to 'Spic'. I was called these insults because people couldn't place me, couldn't tell what I was. My mother telling me I was 'American' was not enough for theses people. 'Come on what are you? Indian, Asian? C'mon you can tell me!' But the thing was I couldn't.

My families past is shrouded in mystery, A mystery I have still not unraveled to this day. Well my father's side anyway. My mother's parents are 100 percent German. More specifically they descend from the Ostrogoths, a Germanic tribe that intermingled with the Huns during the times of the Romans.

On my father's side I can hardly go back to my grandparents without there being instant confusion. I found out later in life that my father was born to his mother when she was only 16. She married a man who was not his biological father in an effort to not be 'cast out' by society seeing as teen pregnancy was looked down even further upon then than it is now.

The confusion goes even farther back. We don't know who my grandmother's mother was. My Great Grandfather was in the navy and from what we knew her mother had died fairly young. All I knew later on is that my grandmother was effectively not white. Not sure what or how.

I gave in after awhile to the questions and the names and simply accepted the title of 'Asian'. Deciding that if I had to pick any race to stick with Korean, since for some reason that's what the first guess normally was. That way I could just answer with, 'Yep your'e right!' and not have to go into further explanations.

1 comment:

  1. My godmother had 2 adopted sons. The second one's birth parents were known. The oldest though had been abandoned, and was clearly of mixed race. He used to tell me, "I'm black today" or "I'm Latin today." That was his way of dealing with the constant questions.

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