Young, Gifted and Biracial

N.B. If you’re my Mom skip this one.

I met my father when I was 23 years old. He was renting an apartment in Northport, AL. He was sitting in his kitchen drinking cooking sherry. And when it’s the first time you’ve met your father, and he offers you a drink of cooking sherry, you fucking drink the goddamn cooking sherry. 

I immediately figured out why I was a big guy. My father is a tower of a man. Long arms, wide shoulders, and at 6’ 7”, I only come up to his chest. I figured out why I have big feet: he’s a size 16. This was a big moment for me. I never felt like I fit in. Not just the normal fitting in either. I was physically different than the world I occupied. But around him, my weird body made sense.

When I was very young, I always imagined who my father could be. One thing was clear: I didn’t have one like other kids. My mom and dad getting married when I was almost 6 was a chance to start over. My dad lived in an apartment in boulder. Mom drove back and forth a lot. There was no city buildup between Denver and boulder back then. There was a big nothing on the boulder turnpike as you drove into the boulder valley. My dad seemed to cook a lot, and we bonded over making pizza with those pre-made Boboli crusts. He adopted me, and I bear his name, not the name of my father. Mom and Dad are still together and happy, near as I can tell.

However, the years of having a whole complete family, the road trips, and all the things we did never seemed to help me forget that there was another man I needed to meet, and when I was in graduate school in 2009, I began my search in earnest. And after some research and several letters, I found him. He called me the first time and asked if I was still in high school. I chuckled at his sense of timing. I feared the worst, and I was pleasantly surprised. He wasn’t an addict or drunk. He was retired and a former feeder league baseball player. He speaks on the slow drawl of his native Alabama. He is not a man of many words. He keeps things pretty simple. He watches basketball, usually from bed.

My father is older than my mother by a decade, which puts him in his mid-70s. I was sad that thanks to Covid, I couldn’t stop by earlier this year. He has done a good job of giving me a peek into his life. I spent Christmas with his family, and I don’t think I’d ever been in a house so full of people I was in some way related to ever before.

It is a difficult thing to grow up in a world of white people who are physically different than you. You stand out in every crowd. People notice your brown skin. When I am with my father’s family, I’m usually the lightest person in the room. It is weird but in a very different way.

It is not an easy thing to be biracial in our society. Americans are the sort that likes to put you in a category. They want you to fit in somewhere. They want to know how you fit into society. This is why I usually say I’m just black. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge my white side; it’s just that I can’t say I’m white, but if I say I’m black, then people know where to file me in their mind. I’m not dishonest. I’ve always said I’m black. I’ve never claimed anything else or tried to be anything else. I’m just black. The reality is that I’m biracial.

This usually means that I get none of the privileges of having a white mother, but I don’t always find my home among black people either. As I crassly put in a Reddit post one time, “Not white enough for the privilege but not black enough for the barbershop.” The reality is that I grew up in a white world with those attitudes and backgrounds. I grew up in the suburbs. I don’t know about the grinding poverty of the black neighborhood as a lived experience. I speak in a cultured manner. I know how to use a 14 place setting. I know formal dances. I’ve been to country clubs and cavorted with wealthy people. However, this has not earned me a place in the hierarchy. I’m too black to get on the white ladder and too white to really hang out with black people. This has led to existence in some odd middle ground.

Being biracial has certainly hurt me more economically than anything else. I have to fight past stereotypes. Despite being gifted and talented at many things, from writing to music and business, I’ve often come up against the economic wall that you experience as a person of color in our society. I’ve been passed over for jobs. I get slings and arrows online. I’ve spent my fair share of time explaining racism as I understand it and experienced it. I wrote a whole part of my first book about it! As one professor in college told me, “There’s passing, and there’s passing, and you’re not passing.” He was instrumental in teaching about racial politics in America and the other side of my heritage that, at 18, I had no real idea about outside of what I’d read in history books. I learned why people looked at me funny. Unfortunately, I realized that skin color does matter, and while I stood on the shoulders of my giant ancestors, our society was far from equitable to people like me.

Dating and romance have been a struggle—every relationship I’ve had has been an interracial relationship with the difficulties that come with that. I’ve had “N” bombs dropped in my presence (but not toward me). One mother of a girlfriend was afraid her grandchildren would be brown. No relationship has lasted so far. I’m not saying that my skin color has anything to do with that, but it’s worth mentioning. The white women I’ve dated have had the experience of getting the looks from other people. We always talk about it.

I don’t know how to end this column other than to say I just wanted to talk about my experience of being young, gifted, and biracial. Someone told me the phrase once, and it stuck in my head. I had this post sitting in my Evernote for some months and now seemed like a good inflection point to talk about my experience of never fitting in and always having to explain my ethnic background. I wanted to talk about having some privilege but not enough actually to make a difference. Most cops have treated me nicely in my interactions with them (I have a lead foot). It’s a struggle every day to deal with the implications of my mixed race, and that’s a stress factor I didn’t even understand until earlier this year when a therapist said it flat-out.