Maya Todd
Writing 101: Coming of Age & Happiness
Instructor: Sheryl Welte Emch
The Minority Problem:
The Effect of My Racial Ambiguity
on My Adolescent Identity Development
Biography
The topic discussed in this essay is one of great personal significance, however, it is not one I had ever taken the time to investigate. My racial ambiguity has always played a role in my life, but I simply had other things on my mind such as grades, sports, or friends. I am grateful for the opportunity to dedicate the necessary time to this topic. While it is cliche, college is a time of defining one’s own identity and processing my racial identity is crucial to my ability to do that. Throughout middle and high school my racial ambiguity was something I thought I could ignore; I would tell myself, it’s not like it really matters anyway. I believed that by ignoring what made me different I could pretend it didn’t impact my life. It took the reflection of this case study for me to recognize that it was already impacting my life without my acknowledgement. The exploration I did regarding this case study also provoked new thoughts on how I perceive and interact with society. I find this topic to be especially interesting when looked at through the lens of modern culture. I remember, years ago, seeing a cover of National Geographic with the face of a woman who looked more like me than any other magazine cover I’d ever seen. The cover article stated that this is what the majority of Americans born in 2050 would look like. However, I saw this article in 2013, and to this day have never met another person whose racial background is as mixed as mine. They are certainly out there, yet few and far between. Interracial marriage was not legal until 1967 in the U.S., meaning that my parents, born in 1971, were the first generation to grow up in a society where interracial relationships were normalized. Therefore, Gen Z is the first generation to see a large spike in interracial babies, with most of these children being the product of two monoracial parents. These mixes are often fetishized and claimed, to some degree, by both racial groups. However, as a society we have not started to ask questions about what we will do with our children. Even further down the line, what will I tell my own children? Given that my mother is mixed, Chinese-Jamaican, and I was born in 2002, I fall a bit out of the usual boxes for racial identity. My face may be the future, but during my lifetime people have been unsure what to do with me. Can the child of someone who is already mixed still identify with any of the groups that make up their race? Or are they too far removed to be afforded this connection? The answer based on my personal experience has been a lifetime of mixed signals.
I want to thank Sheryl Welte- Emch for the incredible class, Writing 101: Coming of Age and Happiness, which produced this work and for her mentorship throughout the publication process. Without you Sheryl I would never have been comfortable sharing this work, thank you.