Black Sheep, White Sheep

Mixed Race and Mixed Up

Here I am again, jumping on another bandwagon. I’m not sure where this one originated, but it was Leonora Watkins who first brought it to my attention. Here’s her story:

Black sheep? Honey, please, I could write about this for days! Not only am I the Black sheep of my family, but I’m also the White sheep. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out.

See that baby? That’s a sweet, innocent mixed-race child who, until that point had done nothing wrong. Give her time, and she’ll do her share, and boy did she! But that’s not the point of this story. Yet, that baby grew up without a home. Not home as in a house, a home as in a tribe, a place to fit and belong, a place she could be accepted.

That baby was me. As anyone who reads me knows, my mother was White, coming from various Northern and Eastern European lineage. And my father was Black, coming from a mostly West-African lineage with a little Native Canadian tossed in.

I was adopted and raised by a Black family. I grew up with people who looked nothing like me. I didn’t notice or care until it was pointed out to me by kids at school.

My mother died when I was 3 weeks old and her family, aside from a senile grandmother, never looked back.

I knew nothing of my mother growing up aside from the fact that she was a beautiful woman who had dreams of becoming a nurse. She had several siblings, none of which I ever met. They weren’t interested. They were White, I wasn’t. That was it. Black Sheep Message #1.

My adopted father took me to see my maternal grandmother in a small, country nursing home every single year. He felt it was the right thing to do. He stood there listening to her, year after year, insulting my biological father, his youngest brother. Her favorite name was the “Black Bastard.”

Then she’d tell me how beautiful I was. How I looked like my mother.

She waxed poetic about how I had milky white skin, how I deserved the finer things in life. Not like my sister, she’d always say, who was darker (and by darker, I mean she looked as White as I did, just not translucent). Pretty confusing stuff for a kid. My dad just told me she was an old lady whose mind had gone and to pay her no attention.

At school, I was ostracized. Often not right away, which is way crueler. I made friends. I got boyfriends. parents loved me. I was the good girl, quiet, smart, and not prone to trouble. Until my Black daddy showed up at the door to pick me up. Funny how that changed everything.

On the other hand, as a teenager, everyone wanted to hang with me because I was somehow cool and different. In our almost exclusively White army base, the Black kids were few and far between. Seriously there were like 5 in my entire time at school from kindergarten to grade 12. I got in on that a bit, as long as I fit what worked for them.

So I didn’t fit in at school. But this is about family.

I tried hard to fit in with the White kids. My mother hated that. She’d scream at me and tell me how I wasn’t White and best remember it. I didn’t understand that then. I do now. My parents didn’t look like me. My biological mother’s family wasn’t interested in that little “ni$$er” baby and yes, that was the term they used.

So, at 16, I went to Nova Scotia for part of the summer to get to know my biological father and the Black side of my family. My sister, who was older than me, lived there and had been raised there. I had tons of cousins there. I went to find myself. I went to find acceptance.

I was used to being cast aside and rejected by White people. By that time, I had some understanding of racism and somehow had just accepted, in a rudimentary, young person way, that some people were just assholes.

But surely my Black family would embrace me, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Wait, that’s not entirely true, my bio-dad’s wife, my what, bio-step mother? Not sure, but we’ll call her E. E embraced me with open arms and treated me, for that summer, and until her death, as one of her own.

Sadly, she was the only one. Everyone knew exactly who I was coming in. They knew who my sister was, who my father was, but there was a wall. it was a strange impenetrable thing. I was “not” one of them.

I was ridiculed and left out for being “too White” or “thinking I was White.” My sister, who was almost as pale as me and had a head full of straight thin hair, was embraced. I wasn’t.

The fact that I went to school. The fact that I liked books and wanted to go to university seemed to be a sticking point. But hey, teenagers, right?

But it didn’t stop there. I’ve been left out of pretty much everything on that side of the family. And whatever I’ve done has been met with scorn and suspicion.

When I graduated from law school, my aunt claimed I was a liar. She claimed she did a “full-fledged investigation,” not just an investigation, into my academic work and that I had not, in fact, received a JD. Well, I did.

So, I ask my brothers and sisters from the Black community, and this is a serious question: What the hell? Why would I be pushed aside? Why would my work go unnoticed?

Is it my skin tone? Is it that I can’t fully understand a lot of the racist shit because I walk this earth as a White woman until I advise otherwise? And if that’s the case, why doesn’t the same thing apply to my sister with the same exact parents and who looks White too? I acknowledge it. I know. I’ve written about it.

The last straw for me was after years of having a relationship with my siblings from my bio-dad’s marriage to E., I was left out at the end, again. Oh, and visiting him at least a dozen times over the years. He became ill with terminal liver cancer. I had to hear it from a cousin.

Oh, and then, he died. I didn’t hear that from anyone. I read that shit on Facebook as a post. Not one sibling, and there are like 7 of us, contacted me. Not one. They had a list of people to contact. They had my number. Nothing, But damn, they sure claimed my ass on the obituary. It’s been a couple of months, and still not a thing. Ain't that shit cute? Guess I wasn’t “family” after all.

You wanna talk about Black sheep, White sheep, whatever, family outcast, honey, I invented it.