A little back story: Essence magazine puts NFL Star Reggie Bush on the cover of its February issue. Black women flood Essence.com with angry comments because Bush dated Kim Kardashian, who is not black. Then, Jill Scott writes an essay for Essence, saying she winces whenever she sees a black man with a white woman. Again, black women flocked to the Website.

What’s different about the piece below is it presents a perspective I haven’t seen in comment sections on other sites.

By Luna’s Fertile Chaos

© Luna’s Fertile Chaos

Recently in a conversation about the direction of the food blog and my writing, a friend I like and trust made a comment about my being biracial and said ‘just get over it.’ Oddly enough, this person is someone who generally encourages just being yourself.

I don’t consider what I write for the faint of heart. If you don’t like it, that’s okay, it’s probably not for you. Yet I need you to understand that the above statement is exactly why I am writing about it.

In the last two issues of Essence there has been uproar about black men and white women coupling which has seriously disturbed me. As the product of such a relationship, I have been verbally bashed, talked down to and made to feel less than by the very culture of black women who demand I not be so white.

So I keep writing because I lived in silence for too many years to not speak up now. It’s my right as an American, as a human, as a woman.

As a voice.

I think it’s unjust for Black women to tell me I must choose between my white and half and my black half, yet hold me at arm’s length. If I date a black man, he only loves me because I am half white. If I date a white man I am betraying my entire race.

So many of my preferences from food to hairstyles have been shaped by the known, i.e. my family. My father’s family wanted me straight haired with makeup, they wanted me to eat soul food, marry black man and have light skinned babies. My mother’s family envied my curls and golden skin, wanted me to be less weird and not eat sushi.

You can say none of it matters. I know that isn’t true. Somewhere in the world are other little girls just like me: we never talk about culture or how it affects us, because when we do, someone, somewhere tells us to ‘just get over it.’

We cannot focus on the past and allow slave days to hold us back any longer. If a black woman chooses a non-black man, she should be loved and supported for making a choice to love freely, as well as to love and accept herself. And besides, why should black men have all the fun?

Multiracial people are the fastest growing population in the world, which speaks, plainly, for itself.

I swore when I was younger that if it was in my power, I would never, ever allow another person to feel lost, alone or as alienated as I felt. If you choose to not associate with me because I won’t stop talking about it, I feel sorry for you.

Being biracial is not who I am, still it has shaped me and many of my opinions. For too long, I never spoke about the difficulties I had growing up, about feeling alienated and alone. This is not my main platform, I agree. But if I help even one person feel better, and less alone, then my purpose here in the world has been served.

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Twitter Parties may not be the best way to have a conversation, but I certainly learned something new at the one I “attended” for biracial families. It’s called the Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage. It was written by Maria P. P. Root, a clinical psychologist, who writes about and gives speeches on multiracial families and multiracial identity.

I definitely could have used this resource in the past and will certainly use it in the future. I had planned to give readers a taste of the document. When I clicked on the link on her site, I received a note that it could only be reproduced in its entirety with the author’s name intact. So here it is …

Bill of Rights
for
People of Mixed Heritage

I HAVE THE RIGHT…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with
my physical or ethnic ambiguity.

I HAVE THE RIGHT…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify.
To identify myself differently than how my parents identify me.
To identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters.
To identify myself differently in different situations.

I HAVE THE RIGHT…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial or multiethnic.
To change my identity over my lifetime–and more than once.
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.
To freely choose whom I befriend and love.
© Maria P. P. Root, PhD, 1993, 1994

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