Race mixing is not always ideal. Sorry, no, I will not serve as an avatar of sunshine rainbow diversity multicultural “success.”

Years ago, this was a taboo subject for me. If someone asked me, “What are you?” (which, by the way, is not really the most tactful way to ask someone about their ethnicity) I would freeze up. I’d get angry, but try not to show it. Sometimes I’d just ignore the question altogether as if it were clearly only asked by mistake, or uttered due to a Tourette tic, and therefore to be ignored so as not to embarass the asker. It would take me hours to calm down.

Nowadays, I don’t really care as much. I’ll usually answer with some generic version of, “I’m a lot of things.” If I’m feeling spicy, I’ll say something like, “What, are you a census taker?” It’s more a source of humor for me now. I can laugh at it. I don’t turn into some schizoid weirdo anymore when the subject of my race comes up. I can examine it detached, clinically, and somewhat neutrally. But it’s not exactly a subject I care to get into. I truly do wish we lived in a race blind world where it was no big deal. But people are curious. And like it or not, race is a fascinating and often contentious subject.

I should probably clarify what I mean when I say, “I hate being biracial.” That’s a pretty extreme statement. I don’t hate myself, to be clear. I hate my racial mixedness and my skin tone that implies it in the same way a 5’2″ guy might hate the fact that he’s short. Or a balding guy hates that he’s losing his hair. Or the way someone might hate that they struggle with their weight. I don’t view race as some “extra” thing about one’s identity. It’s just another physical attribute of one’s body. I hate that it’s a “conversation piece.” Something that it feels I have to justify or explain. It’s like missing an eye — you’ll invariably get that question of how you lost it. I also hate the size of my nose and my acne-prone skin too, for that matter. So, it’s purely in that vein.

I’m not saying being racially mixed is inherently a negative. Some people I’m sure love it or take “pride” in it. Me, not so much. It’s always felt like I was wearing clothes that don’t fit.

I tend to surprise people when I bluntly state how I don’t like being mixed. “What, OMG, but what about Tiger Woods or (fill in the blank racially mixed celebrity)?” Yeah, what about him? His race is Wealthy Celebrity Athlete, not whatever mix he is.

“Oh, but you have the best of both worlds. Whites tan at salons all the time so they can look like you.” If it’s so great, then everyone would be in an interracial relationship so they could have mixed kids. Except the vast majority aren’t because they don’t want that, because most people want their kids to look like them.

“But you look like the future.” What future? When? In two hundred years? Why should I give a fuck what people hypothetically may look like in two centuries?

“But Jesus was biracial” (yes, someone said that). What? No he wasn’t. He wasn’t even really human (assuming he existed). You see any ordinary people turn water into wine or rise from the dead? I didn’t think so.

::sigh::

Race carries with it more social baggage than most other physical characteristics. People tend to assume all kinds of different things about your race. One’s race can often result in far different life experiences and perspectives. I don’t subscribe to many of the left wing concepts about DEI, unconcious racial bias, and a lot of other race-themed stuff. It all seems to be targeted unfairly in one direction — at Whites. A lot of it is nonsense. And also because honestly, I just don’t care. So-called “bias” is often rooted in simple pattern recognition. If a woman by herself sees me walking down the street at night, she’s more apt to feel afraid of me than another woman. Well, duh. That’s because men commit like 99% of all assaults, and mostly they assault women. By the same token, if you had to guess who the majority of shooting victims in major cities are, and you thought Black youths, you’d be correct. Stats are not a form of “bias.” Self-preservation based on pattern recognition is not bias. But I get where the leftoids are coming from in some ways. Some genuine racism exists. Okay, got it.

I’m also not as extreme as, say, Jesse Lee Peterson, who refuses to acknowledge that racism even exists. But I also get where he’s coming from there, too. Racism is very overrated these days as a social ill. Most times if someone doesn’t like you, it has nothing to do with your race. They just don’t like you individually. Too many people are too quick to assume it’s all about race and racism. It really isn’t. I also don’t care for the right wing platitude, “There’s only one race — the human race.” Really, you sure about that? Because I’ve never seen a right winger (or anyone, for that matter) just blindly choose where to buy a house. Usually “the type of neighborhood” (i.e. how many Blacks/Browns live there) factors a great deal into where one intends to live, especially if they’re White.

I’ve written elsewhere about my ethnic heritage. Here’s a link to an article where I display my exact genetic makeup from 23andMe.

Basically, I’m 64% European. Mainly a mix of Italian, Irish, English, Portugese, and other things. While also being about 25% Indigenous American due to my Mexican/Hispanic background. The small remainder is a mix of West Asian (4.9%) and Sub-Saharan African (2.7%). The precise genetic mixing is not that important. What’s important is that I’m dark and different looking enough to not just be “plain boring” White. Most people don’t really know what the hell I am just from looking, though many will guess Hispanic, as that part of me dominates my physical features.

For the fortunate, their race or ethnicity is not a contentious issue. For some it’s a total non-factor. For me, even the fact that I was racially mixed at all was a source of debate. Well, denial, really. My mother (White, mainly Italian and almost entirely European) always insisted that I too, was White, because “Hispanics are considered Caucasian.” That’s debatable in some ways depending on how closely related one is to the Spanish versus the native tribes the Spaniards and other Western nations colonized way back when. But few people will just lump Mexicans in with White unless they look totally White. Certainly not dark. I did not have “dark” skin, I had “Mediterranean olive skin,” according to my mom. Given that I am 64% European, I can see her point. But I think a lot of my mother’s beliefs were wishful projections on her part. She split from my father when I was barely an infant, and then the two fought a nasty two-year custody battle over me. My father is where I get my darker pigmentation, as he’s largely Mexican. My mother did not wish to have a Mexican-looking kid. She wanted a kid who looked more like her. So, therefore, I was “White,” darker complexion be damned.

It’s a tough thing for one’s mere conception to become the source of great conflict and drama between parents. When you add in the culture and racial clash, it can become pretty severe. Then when you also add in the fact that one parent denies that you’re even racially mixed to begin with, it can create a rather toxic identity-shattering brew. Making matters worse, I did not have the opportunity to know my biological father growing up. I never had any connection to my Mexican/Hispanic heritage. I did not get to know my many half-siblings on my father’s side. That whole part of my background was handwaved away and treated as though irrelevant. My mother later married a White guy whom I never cared for, and then had three more children. I was the lone mixed bastard offspring.

As a kid I adapted fine to the family dynamic. What other choice did I have? It was only as I got older that I realized what a shit deal it all was for me, and resented being the different one. I wasn’t even allowed to refer to my step-dad as “step-dad.” He was my “father,” which became a source of contention and conflict. My mother’s separation of me from my real father was never really explained and never justified. Making things worse, my mother became an extreme fundamentalist Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition. This was at the height of the “Moral Majority” and End Times stuff in the ’80s and ’90s. My mother viewed her past with my father as her old, “sinful” life. Now she was “saved.” This is not uncommon. Many women go out into the world, get pregnant by some dude they end up hating, then do the about face into the piety and religion thing. It’s practically a trope, which I call “whiplash conversion.”

This whiplash conversion trope is something White women excel at particularly. Get knocked up by a Brown/Black guy they were just “experimenting” with, then go running into the arms of a safe White guy provider and turn Christian and go to church three times a week. It’s become such a common thing that it’s mercilessly mocked on the racist side of X and other social media. It’s called “paying the toll,” “coal burning” or “mudsharking.” There are tons of memes about it which I won’t share here, but they’re easy enough to find. Having been the product of such experimentation and suffered as a result, I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel visceral anger when seeing such cataclysmic breakups happen to other children, especially boys. It’s not pleasant to know that most of society views you as the butt of a joke, even though they’d never admit it outloud. Sure, you can say it’s “only social media.” But social media reflects a lot of actual social thought.

For me, race mixing, and its consequence of racially mixed offspring, will always carry a negative taint, even though I myself am biracial. It will always be something that bears high risk. Like carrying nitroglycerine across a cobblestone road. It will always be something that represents pain and loss for me, due to the fallout between my parents and how it affected me. Divorce and parental strife is bad for children of all races, but for the biracial there is the added risk of losing touch with half their heritage, and potentially feeling lost and bearing an identity crisis later in life. Many biracial people report having conflicted identity issues no matter what.

Many biracial people would choose one side over the other if they could, and feel it isn’t themselves but society that chooses what they are. It’s that lack of having a choice about who you are that bothers me especially. I also have no choice but to perpetuate race mixing if I were to have kids. No matter what race my wife would be, my children will be mixed because of me. Do I risk potentially burdening them with the same issues I had?

Even in an ideal family situation, there’s a tendency to prefer association with those who look like you. Like tends to attract like. This is why Whites tend to buy homes in White neighborhoods. It’s why race tends to marry within race, even in supposedly multicultural America. Something like 80% of White women marry White guys. Black women and Asian women tend to be most open to marrying outside color lines. With Hispanic women, it’s more split. But then many Hispanics do pass for White or have some overlap (like myself).

Being biracial puts you at a statistical disadvantage when it comes to finding a partner, because you have to find one who is comfortable with both your backgrounds — something I’ve found is not often the case. You could, of course, try to find another biracial person. But we are actually few and far between, and depending on shade, we tend to go for our “dominant” side. Then there is the aspect of disappointing both sides. As I wrote about in the above-linked article, I’ve been told I’m “too White” by Hispanic women and not White at all by White women, or not White enough. Something I’ll always find sadly amusing.

You also have to watch out that you’re not just a “flavor of the month,” or that someone is only interested in you just because of your skin tone. Many years ago, a White lady at work tried to set me up with her only daughter because her daughter was “into Hispanic guys.” I politely told her no thanks. I have no idea what it means to be “Hispanic.” It’s just genetic happenstance to me. I’m just a man. I’d rather someone like me for me. This was a tough thing to do, because her daughter seemed nice and I did find her attractive, and I got along well with her mother. I sometimes think back to that encounter and think that had she approached me from a better angle, how it could have gone another way. But I didn’t have any idea what sort of expectations a girl who’s “into Hispanic guys” had, and it honestly made me uncomfortable. I get that race is a factor in attraction, but it’s usually not something that’s a first priority unless you’re fetishizing it. Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.

Being mixed is like living in a racial no-man’s land. Given the fact that virtually every social environment I grew up in was nearly 100% White, it’d have been far easier for myself to have just been White rather than only culturally White. Being Not Actually White but having to be surrounded by Actual Whites makes one feel like a fraud, as I suppose it would be for a “daywalker” of any other race. Half-Black, Half-Asian, whatever. I never really felt comfortable or fit in, even with my own half-siblings. It’s not exactly psychologically healthy to always feel alien, especially when living in your own house. Moving around as much as I did didn’t help things, either. And I moved a lot. You tend to feel more alone and isolated. It was increasingly harder to even relate to my own mother. I look very little like her, and in fact, look the most like my father out of all his kids. Had I grown up and lived in a largely Hispanic area, I would probably have felt the same alienness about my Whiteness.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Perhaps my experiences are what led to my self-reliant and highly individualist nature as an adult. Besides, virtually all kids have trouble fitting in in their own way. I knew a White girl in fifth grade who one day decided to stab herself in the side with a pencil because she didn’t like being in class. I remember the side of her t-shirt soaked with blood as she got up to go to the nurse. I wonder what kind of inner turmoil she must have been going through. For all my inner angst at the time, I mean, hey, I never stabbed myself or did any self-harm. It could have been worse, you know?

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These days, mixedracedness and diversity are broadly celebrated. At least it would appear that way in the media. There is less cream cheese on TV and in movies in favor of caramel and chocolate. Racially ambiguous stars like The Rock and Vin Diesel are popular. Hell, we had a biracial president in Barack Obama. Doesn’t all of that mean we’re progressing? Surely we are on the cusp of a racially blind utopia. Daywalkers like myself should be rejoicing as we enter this new age. Except I think we’re more divided now than ever. I think a lot of diversity is forced, contrived for image, and not exactly genuine. Like I said before, people freely associate. We don’t exist in some hypothetical national narrative perpetuated by the media. We exist at the local level. In our own lives. Not in an NFL commercial. Racial and ethnic tensions still exist. But whether you’re one race or another, at least you know what team you’re playing on. When you’re mixed, you have no idea, and neither does anyone else.

My perspective has grown and matured over the years. In the end, you get handed the genetic cards you’re dealt, and you’ve got to play them however you can. Both my parents are short, and yet somehow I wound up six feet tall. Something like only 15% of men are six feet or higher. That’s a plus. Most of my family lived long healthy lives, even into their 90s. I’ve been healthy my whole life, knock on wood. I admit that a lot of my thinking about being biracial is colored negatively because of how my parent’s relationship fell apart. Had things gone better there I probably would feel rosier about it. But the chips fell as they did.

I don’t view any one race as inherently better or worse. But there’s no denying that being in a region where one race is the super majority that you’ll likely feel isolated and alien if you look different. However, it’s not like being White means you automatically fit in with other Whites. No race or ethnicity is a monolith. Still, I’ll probably go to my grave hating being biracial. For me it brough too many complications I’d just assume not have. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing for someone else. Everyone is different in their own way.