Living in a Whitewashed World

It seems silly, but it’s true. I forget that I’m not white — at least, not fully white. I was raised by a white mother. For most of my life, I was surrounded by white family and white friends and white neighbors. After being whitewashed for so long, I often forget that I have other colors within me. I am Cherokee and Puerto Rican and Black. I am Black, and honestly, that is the one that I forget most of all. I didn’t feel ashamed of this fact, passively forgetting the Blackness in me, until October of last year. I was in a coffee shop on campus, dividing my time between chatting with my boyfriend and reading through a psychology assignment, when I saw my phone light up. It was one of my friends from Alabama, congratulating me on being in an interracial relationship. He himself was dating a biracial girl, a fact he took deep pride in. His congratulations first confused me, and then, I realized: my boyfriend was white, and I was not. Was that how society saw us, then, as a token “ethnic progressive” couple? <a href="https://medium.com/@nataliedeane/living-in-a-whitewashed-world-bf45e8e97d4">Click Here</a>