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Being black and white has its perks. You don’t get a sunburn every easily and tanning is a breeze. But being biracial has a lot of downsides, especially at a young age. One of the things that I hated the most about being biracial was that people never thought that my mother was my mother. My mother is white, blonde and has blue eyes. I do not look like my mother. I’m tan, have brown hair and hazel eyes. I definitely do not look like my mother. My mother once told me of a time when an older, white woman asked where she got me from as if my mother couldn’t possibly have given birth to me herself. The only time anyone would immediately think that she was my mother is if my father was standing next to her. Unfortunately, my parents got divorced before I was even two years old. You would never see my parents stand together especially because my father has since remarried and my stepmother has never taken a liking to my mom. My stepmother was born and raised in Mississippi surrounded with plenty of racial tension. By the time she came to California, she had already developed a sense of resentment towards white people. She thought my mother was a stuck up white person, who felt that she was holier than thou because she married a black man and had his children. My stepmother’s feeling towards my mom were very obvious and this caused a lot of family tension. Because of my stepmother, who was widowed twice before marrying my father, had no children, just nieces, and nephews, she had wanted to develop a maternal relationship with me and my siblings. Her attentions were mostly focused on me because I was the youngest, at only five years old. For the longest time, she had requested that I call her mom but I steadily refused due to the fact that I already had a mom. Even my mother told me that it was okay to call my stepmother my mom but I still refused. This made my stepmother dislike my mother even more. She felt as if I had chosen white people over blacks and that my mother had turned me against black people. This thought process is reflected deeply in society’s need to constantly pit black people against white people. A feeling that, I now realize, my stepmother had grown accustomed to because she grew up around all the racial tensions you would see in Mississippi at the time. Growing up with my stepmother, she would often make comments that made me feel as if she wanted me to pick a side. And that the side I had to pick was the side of black people. One time when I was eating at IHOP with my siblings, my father, and my stepmother, my stepmother had gotten mad at me for saying something, that I don’t even remember. And she stated that “you are no better than the rest of us, your mother may be white, but you have more than a single drop of black blood in you so, you are black, not white.” I had never felt so horrified to hear a black person quote Jim Crow to put down another black person. It was probably at this moment when I unconsciously chose a side, the side of my mother, not because she is white but because she is honestly a good person. Now that I’m older, I can recognize that moments like this probably affected me very deeply. When I was younger I had crushes on boys like any young girl would. And race had never had any part of who I ended up liking. I was just as likely to like a black boy as I was to like a white boy but slowly as I got older, I noticed that the boys who I had crushes on seemed to be only white, which is a big thing because in the schools I went to, there was a smaller population of white students. I realize now that my friendships had also been affected. By the time I had gotten through high school, I noticed that a majority of my friends were not black. I had plenty of Hispanic and Asian friends, several Armenian friends, and a lot of white friends. I know that I wasn’t making any black friends because I didn’t fit in with them. I was mostly raised by my mother and I didn’t have much of a relationship with my father. I was considered white washed. While I didn’t look like my mother, I didn’t exactly look like my father either. Compared to my dad, I basically looked like a white person. I had gotten a little of his traits, like my nose, but other than that we didn’t really resemble each other much. It didn’t help that I had become obsessed with having straight hair from years of being teased in elementary school for looking like a lion. Apparently, my hair looked like a lion’s mane. I would straighten my hair to look like the other girls around me, who tended to be mostly Mexican with long, straight hair. Without my curls, I looked even less like my dad because most people could really only tell that I’m biracial when my hair was curly. I had also developed a preference towards dying my hair blonde in high school to look more like my mother. It took me a long time to recognize the beauty of my curly hair and I mostly came to like my hair because everyone else said they liked my curly hair. While I felt a disconnect from my mother because we didn’t look alike, I also felt disconnected from my father because I didn’t see him much and when I did, I often felt pressured by my stepmother to take sides. Because of this, I do not feel connected to either side of my cultures. I don’t feel like I identify with either white people or black people. But I do not feel lost because I identify as biracial, making it easier to connect with other biracial and multinational people even if they are not black and white. Mixed children are connected by the very fact that we are never just one thing. We are a part of the Melting Pot that is America.