What Being Mixed Race in a Small Town Does to Your Sense of Beauty: Otherwise Known as Growing Up “Exotic”

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-01-07 17:44Z by Steven

What Being Mixed Race in a Small Town Does to Your Sense of Beauty: Otherwise Known as Growing Up “Exotic”

Bustle
2015-01-06

Justin Robert Thomas Smith

Let me just start by saying this: Up until this point (and hopefully for at least a little while longer), I’ve led a relatively charmed life. I grew up with lots of love and emotional support from my single mother and the rest of our family; with a roof over the top bunk of the bed I rested my head on well into my teenage years; with a warm meal delivered to me almost every night from the diner my family continues to own to this day; and blessed with every new video game system as soon as it hit the market — a big deal for a family of softcore gamers. But relativity will always be a slippery slope, and a charmed life doesn’t come without a curse or two to keep the magic alive and the blessings counted. My curse? Growing up in a place where I was considered “exotic” by almost everyone. In other words: Being mixed isn’t all vanilla-chocolate-swirls or Uh-Oh Oreos.

Where I grew up, most lives were led in a similarly charmed manner. Where I grew up, most lives were also white. In Lacey Township, NJ — a small conglomerate of towns that added their populations up to hit a whopping 25,000 residents — I could count on my hands how many black families paid their taxes (an extremely low percentage of diversity that was roughly equal to that of any other minority’s presence in the area). Keeping that in mind, I was also raised solely by a white mother: My black father had been [rarely in, but for the most part] out of the picture for a long time, which gave our family’s frame an unusual shape to go with its already unusual coloring. People were surprised to see my mother alone with three dark-skinned children, but — and I believe this is especially because she was white — they felt comfortable enough to make comments to her (and eventually, as we got older, even to us) about our more “exotic-looking” features. That’s how I was first introduced to a crazy little thing called microaggression, or — you know — unintentional discrimination…

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