![]() ![]() Los Angeles had been plagued with the racially charged Rodney King and Reginald Denny cases just years before, when riots had flooded our streets, filling the sky with ash that flaked down like apocalyptic snow I shared my mom's heartache, but I wanted us to be safe. Her eyes welling with hateful tears, I could only breathe out a whisper of words, so hushed they were barely audible: 'It's OK, Mommy.' I was trying to temper the rage-filled air permeating our small silver Volvo. My skin rushed with heat as I looked to my mom. We were leaving a concert and she wasn't pulling out of a parking space quickly enough for another driver. ![]() I was home in LA on a college break when my mom was called the 'N' word. And I drew back: I was scared to open this Pandora's box of discrimination, so I sat stifled, swallowing my voice. 'Oh, well that makes sense.' To this day, I still don't fully understand what she meant by that, but I understood the implication. I smiled meekly, waiting for what could possibly come out of her pursed lips next. ![]() 'You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?' she said. Navigating closed-mindedness to the tune of a dorm mate I met my first week at university who asked if my parents were still together. I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt.Īnd I tried. I couldn't bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. 'Because that's how you look, Meghan,' she said. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other – and one half of myself over the other. There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do. There was a mandatory census I had to complete in my English class – you had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic or Asian. My dad had taken the sets apart and customised my family.įast-forward to the seventh grade and my parents couldn't protect me as much as they could when I was younger. On Christmas morning, swathed in glitter-flecked wrapping paper, there I found my Heart Family: a black mom doll, a white dad doll, and a child in each colour. I don't remember coveting one over the other, I just wanted one. This perfect nuclear family was only sold in sets of white dolls or black dolls. It was called The Heart Family and included a mom doll, a dad doll, and two children. ![]() When I was about seven, I had been fawning over a boxed set of Barbie dolls. I was too young at the time to know what it was like for my parents, but I can tell you what it was like for me – how they crafted the world around me to make me feel like I wasn't different but special. And there was my mom, caramel in complexion with her light-skinned baby in tow, being asked where my mother was since they assumed she was the nanny. They moved into a house in The Valley in LA, to a neighbourhood that was leafy and affordable. Whatever it was, they married and had me. I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques. It was the late Seventies when my parents met, my dad was a lighting director for a soap opera and my mom was a temp at the studio. And while I have dipped my toes into this on, sharing small vignettes of my experiences as a biracial woman, today I am choosing to be braver, to go a bit deeper, and to share a much larger picture of that with you. It's easy to talk about which make-up I prefer, my favourite scene I've filmed, the rigmarole of 'a day in the life' and how much green juice I consume before a requisite Pilates class. When I was asked by ELLE to share my story, I'll be honest, I was scared. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. ![]()
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