formulating my identity

Posted on by ellednyc

coming of age in NYC was a privilege for which I will forever be grateful, though I certainly wasn’t all that aware of it at the time. my mom, aunt & our “village” worked diligently to keep me grounded, well-educated & fully exposed to so much of what the city had to offer. to me, the diversity in this great city was the norm. my elementary & middle school classmates spanned the gamut of hues, ethnicities, backgrounds & I eagerly & happily soaked it all in without a second thought. & without ever having discourses about it with my mom or family, I was always acutely aware that my complexion differed from my mom’s. it was never brought to my attention by my classmates or anyone of significance in my life, just something that I casually observed & accepted as my reality. I remember publicly acknowledging this for the first time in 3rd or 4th grade when we studied the Civil Rights Movement & I came to the startling realisation that my mother & I could perhaps have been legally kept separate at some point in our nation’s harrowing history & I wept in class. yet outside of this experience, I was never made to feel different, interesting, unique, or anything else of note based on my clear visual distinction from my mother & aunt. this until I moved to Washington, DC.

somewhere between naturally gravitating towards the progressives & people of colour in my new middle school in DC {shout out to the bestie-to-this-day}  & applying for the Black Student Somethingorother scholarship at my would-be new high school & feeling supremely awkward (whilst also befriending the same groups of people}, I ended up starting my sophomore year of high school at a predominately Black school for the arts. where the prior year & a half had been spent charting unknown territory in predominately white spaces, this would be my first time experiencing the complete opposite & frankly I was *thrilled* to do so. that until my already-challenged norms came to a screeching halt when I was told in the hallway during my first couple of weeks or so in school that I was “cute for a white girl.” what did that even MEAN?! my world was officially flipped on its head & I suddenly had no idea where I was meant to fit. so I set about creating those parameters for myself.

elementary
elementary dos
high school

{click to enlarge}

hey there

Gallery | Posted on by ellednyc

welcome to mixed chic

a platform for women of varied and diverse backgrounds to unite through our shared experiences of navigating the world in an “other” space. it is my sincere hope that this can evolve into a community of bold, brilliant, beautiful and eclectic women coming together through our common bond of our inherent connection to multiple cultures. I’d love to see this space flourish into an expression of the many triumphs and challenges that can arise from such an experience, whether through storytelling, fashion, music, or otherwise.

I call myself a fair-skinned woman of color, which seems to be a paradox for many. thick curls with fine strands, pear-shaped and proud. at first glance, surely I’m Jewish. or perhaps Latina? I suppose to go back into my family history makes neither of these wrong, per se, but there is so much more to the story. my maternal family is thoroughly mixed going back many generations. my mother, her mother and father, their parents all infused with so many rich cultures and traditions that I can only hope to continue to access as I grow. my grandmother, an early member of the NPHC sorority Delta Sigma Theta, is just as fair as I. with a Creole mother and a Mexican father, surely her story was deeply complex. in an era where both the one-drop rule & the brown paper bag test reigned supreme, surely she could have chosen to abandon the complexities and implications of both and perhaps decide to pass for white, but that was never her lot. she walked as best she could in the fullness of the path laid by her ancestors. working her whole life as a social worker and educator in her own communities of color. consecutively marrying two distinguished, black servicemen. raising beautiful, ambiguously brown children at a time where there was yet no space to identify as mixed or multiracial and so they proudly called themselves Black. living her truth to the best of her ability.

there is a burden carried by people of color in our nation and in our world that I will likely never know firsthand. my experience has often been yet the reverse, being the apparent “other” in the black and brown spaces where I tend to feel the most at home. often feeling the need to lead with my “story” as I introduce myself to strangers, so that inherent bond of brother or sisterhood that they clearly don’t yet feel might be established. slowly and methodically peeling away at all the layers. these are the spaces that I’d love to see this blog enter and begin to break open; sharing our stories and experiences as a wonderfully diverse human race.