What's Your Favorite Colour?
I don't discuss it much because generally it's irrelevant, people either don't know or don't care - and frankly my identity isn't super-tied up with it and I prefer to live in a color-blind world.
But I am what my mom used to call "mixed" and also that "I pass" - for white that is.
It was more of an issue when I was growing up because my mom was darker skinned than I am. I pass and she did not, but she was a light-skinned black - also mixed. When she talked about it she'd go into a history lesson about where many blacks were likely from in Africa and how much of all of us are mixed. All of us. And she'd remind me she was from France, which to her was the bigger identifier of import to her. And I have friends who do the chromosome tests like "23 and me" and these days we can discover all sorts of proof of continental and sub-mixing for almost all of us.
Once I was in school and had my established set of friends, there weren't any issues. And as I got older the number of times where mom and I were in public meeting new people where some sort of confusion cropped up about how we were related or not was vanishingly small. I'd say we looked alike just I look white and she didn't "pass." Once I was out of college, moved to the West Coast, and for most of my adult life the subject just never came up.
The whole definition thing is weird to me and mostly I avoid it. I think a lot of it is fraught with nonsense. How much Jew do you have to have in you, is it from your mom or your dad's side for Hitler to want to kill you? I call it nonsense but obviously the distinctions people make can be deadly serious. And even within cultures, self-definition is hugely important and I get why people want to lay claim or not lay claim to where they think they do or do not fit.
Anyway, I bring it up because my daughters are different shades. Charlotte looks a lot like me. The twins are split with one of them, Maddy, significantly darker than the other. J and I talked about my background way back, and once the twins were born I had no illusions that the topic would arise. I'm amazed when it does come up though, not shocked, but still incredulous.
The questions, I'd like to think the questions have some sort of merit behind them, in the sense I guess I can understand the confusion, maybe? I try to be polite and not take offense
If a person doesn't know J, I'm at a park or whatever, this question or a variant -
"Is the father black?"
My answer, "No, I am."
I've given this answer a few times, then I usually have to follow up with the "My mom was black, I pass." mini-explanations. I don't realy want to talk about it at all, but I try not to just skirt the topic entirely, because I've thought about it some and decided giving people a short, honest answer with no attitude was a way to maybe make them more informed. The momentray shock/surprise I sometimes see on faces is strange. Once again, it's not unexpected, I just I wish it wasn't so.
I try to make it gentle by remaining totally friendly and matter of fact about it. Although I wonder inwardly why people need to know anything. A child I am with is darker than I am, what of it? The fact that the twins are often together, often in a stroller, pretty close in size and very clearly sisters as far as family feature stuff etc. doesn't seem to totally stop people from being confused about their relatedness. I imagine that will get worse as they get older as the twinness of them will seem less obvious wearing similar outfits or in a stroller together.
J's boys are different shades too, but in a way no-one ever notices. the older one has fairer skin and is more likely to get a sunburn. The younger is slightly more olive, and tans more easily. Older: blonder, blue eyes, younger: browner hair, brown eyes. The differences are admittedly tiny - by the standards of a population that doesn't bother making that kind of distinction.
Like I said, I try not to let it all ruffle my feathers. For nearly 20 years of adult life it had become transparent to me, an almost forgotten non-issue, my otherness wasn't defined by my "race" (btw I don't even know what I think of myself as, mixed I guess) so much as how I got objectified as female. There was and is so much more crap that has gone with that than my coloration. I can't "pass" for non-woman. But then again no one asks me if I got my figure from my mom or dad. I'm guessing, based on the very few decent photos, I'm shaped more like my paternal grandmother. But even that is a dodge, I'm a mix of all of them - and then I am also what I have chosen to make of myself.