One-Dropping and Multi-Dropping: Embracing Contradictions of the Racialized Self (A Personal Journey) |
Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton
My exploration of my mixed race identity began in my early 20’s after an incident I describe in my blog post entitled “There I Said It: Reflections on Identity from a Feminist Racial Hybrid”. But I didn’t exactly get thrown out of the Black community on Monday and proclaim myself as “mixed race” by Thursday.
My process for coming into my mixed race identity was slow because though I was socially ostracized from many Black peers by my junior year in college for outing myself as a “feminist”, I was still embraced by other Black people who didn’t feel threatened by my public declaration. Likewise, in my neighborhood which was predominantly Black but had a good number of Filipinos who settled in the area post World War II, people knew we were a mixed family. I don’t recall there ever being a situation where people treated me like anyone but a full member of that community. I think why I experienced this ease was due to the fact that I was raised to be Black with Filipino traditions passed on by my Filipina great-gram. My great-gram placed more emphasis on us keeping her cultural traditions alive rather than insisting we call ourselves Filipino because she was acutely aware of how her mixed race children, grands, and great-grams were judged as Black. So, I didn’t go around saying I was “part this, or part that” which might have led to harassment or ostracism from the Black community. I just said I was Black in public and in private, I could be both or neither if I wanted…
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