Seeing The Color of My Skin
I have a hard time writing about being mixed-race because I’m white-passing and benefit from that privilege.
I rarely write about my race because I can never find the right words for it. When I was small, I bore the weight of a question mark on my face. Growing up in Brooklyn, people would look at my bone-white mother, my non-existent father, and then they’d see me: the pale face, the kinky hair as we called it back then. A girl you spoke Spanish to because you thought she knew it. A girl that held your gaze because you couldn’t get the make of her. Whispers on the stoop.
She looked white but wasn’t.
When I asked about my biological father, my mother was an artisan of fiction. He was American Indian, Peruvian, Spanish, but mostly he was nothing at all. A conversation stopper. A silent retreat. My father was a man who once came back for me and she slammed the door in his face.
It was only after her death in 2015 that I learned my biological father was black. A few years earlier, I took one of those DNA tests where you spit into a tube and a computer analyzes your geography. And I remember opening the envelope, expecting Puerto Rico but found Africa.
