Being Mixed means all kinds of people feel entitled to say crazy things to you. They appoint themselves experts on YOUR identity, your life, sometimes your very existence.
My memoir, SWIRL GIRL: Coming of Race in the USA, details many of these moments. but one incident stands out above all others. Looking back, it had a deeper, more lasting impact on the formation of my identity than anything anyone has ever said to me. Check it out:
Seattle, Washington, 1969.
In ninth grade I was being bussed—against my will—to integrate schools in Seattle’s North End, far from my Central Area community.
This new school was cold and unwelcoming. It was clear that the white students didn’t want us there. Neither did the teachers.
I was surprised to meet a Black girl who didn’t ride the bus with the rest of us. She said that she lived in that school district way out in the North End. I wondered why her family had made that choice.
She was brown-skinned and the kind of cute that would blossom into high-cheekboned beauty. Like me, she had a few pimples and a few extra pounds. We weren’t ugly or rejected, but we weren’t at the top of anyone’s list either.
As we were getting to know each other, she squinted and asked, “What are you?”
“Mixed.”
Back then, this simple one-syllable response was usually sufficient. Everybody knew it meant that your dad was Black and your mom wasn’t.
“Mixed with what?” I wasn’t accustomed to follow-up questions.
“Black and Jewish.”
Her face twisted up as if she smelled something putrid. She shook her head. “No. No. You CAN’T be Black AND Jewish at the same time!”
I stepped back, thinking she might be unstable. “That’s what I am.”
“But, but,” she sputtered. “Those two things just don’t go together. Black people are Christian and go to church. Jewish people don’t believe in Jesus and go to—”
“Synagogue,” I said with a sigh. It took all my self control not to roll my eyes.
She jumped up. “Yeah! See what I mean? They don’t fit. So you can’t be both!”
I wanted to say that her Black family living in this white area didn’t fit either, but the certainty with which she erased the possibility of my existence froze my tongue. I wondered if growing up Black in such a White environment had damaged her brain. Then I thought about it: if none of the Black people she’d seen were Jewish, and none of the Jewish people she’d seen were Black, maybe It was hard for her to imagine both identities co-existing in a single body.
But I was living, breathing proof of this so-called impossibility.
Nobody should ever have to hear the words, "You can't be." And nobody should ever utter them, either.
I stood to face her.
“Listen. I CAN be Black and Jewish because that’s what I AM,” I said slowly. “Okay?”
“You mean like Sammy Davis Jr?”
I shook my head. “Hell no! Sammy Davis Jr. isn’t—well, he’s different, that’s all. But we’re both real. If you don’t believe that, you can’t be my friend.”
She stared at me for a long minute, then nodded. One time.
We became friends. And we never discussed my identity again.
But that moment stayed with me: the feeling of erasure, of being told that your existence, your life, your being-ness were incomprehensible. The sensation of being seen as an abomination of humanity. A racial freak show.
That conversation planted the seed of purpose that drives my words and my work to this day.
Nobody should ever have to hear the words, “You CAN’T be!”
And nobody should ever utter them, either.
This applies to anyone, Mixed or not, whose being, whose identity and presence challenge anyone else’s views of what is “possible.”
Let’s stop denying people their truths and open our minds to appreciate, celebrate, and recognize their full humanity. Even—or especially—when it challenges our sense of who we are.
What an assured young woman you were! People questioned me a lot, especially when seeing me among nonBlack family members. For some reason, I just pegged them as ignorant. I didn't think it my job to correct them. After all, I knew who I was and didn't care what they thought.