More than 9 million Americans currently identify as mixed raced and that number is growing exponentially. Oftentimes, those who are mixed find themselves lost between the two versions of themselves, as they don’t fit in either group.
Sometimes, it comes as not looking like either side of your family or not being able to relate to other members of your community or how some traditions are pushed to the side so that others can take the forefront.
One would think that one of the benefits of being ethnically ambiguous is the ability to blend in anywhere, but in reality, it’s one of the reminders that you don’t really fit anywhere.
I am of Iraqi and Bosnian descent, halfway between nude beaches and the world’s oldest mosques. Being a hybrid of two very different cultures leads to a strange upbringing of never really fitting into either. I don’t look like anyone from my mother’s side of the family, and while I physically resemble more of my father’s side, I break too many traditions to call myself one of them.
This was a topic of conversation that I shared with Samuel Oyerinde, an Atlanta native and premed major at Vanderbilt University.
Oyerinde is of Nigerian and Mexican descent and a first-generation American.
“The struggles of being mixed are amplified when you’re first-gen,” he said. “The only family I know are the ones in my house. The only thing I can do is call them on the phone.”
Oyerinde says that mixed-race people face unseen pressure as coming from two cultural backgrounds.
“It’s hard to feel like you are doing your culture justice, I have to learn twice as much as everyone else.”
Tradition follows everything I do, whether visible or not. I know I don’t look like an Arab woman, and this further separates me from my culture.
Non-Muslims see my free hair as a political statement against the oppression of the hijab, while some Muslims will criticize my lack of faith. I know at work, my colleagues see my pantsuit and treat me as one of the more “civilized” of the radical Muslims they speak against, but they can’t see the nazar (“evil eye”) bracelet under my sleeve that matches my aunt’s.
I know my siblings and I stick out to the other members of our family. We are the black sheep that live outside traditional lands, the first to be born in the United States and the only ones who do not speak the mother tongue. Sometimes, it seems like the only thing both sides of my family can agree on is that no one has ever seen anything like us.
While it can sometimes feel like we are strangers in our own families, there are traditions we make for ourselves. We challenge boundaries and stereotypes of what it means to be who we are, and while we oftentimes break traditions — we will try everything but pork.
Oyerinde summarized these feelings best: “We are untraditional. People don’t expect something like us.”
