Dark Skinned White Girls?

“Now half and half mixed girls
I know what the battle be
Everytime you go out it’s… whats your nationality?”
Everybody always wanna dig up in ya background
You don’t look… now how does that sound?
I couldn’t tell you were… oh is that right?
Do you take it as a compliment or start up a fight?
Venezuelan and Indian, Rican and Dominican
Japanese or Portuguese, Quarter of Brazilian
White and Korean, Black and Pinay
I can find out later
It don’t matter, ya fly” – Murs

What does it mean to be a dark skinned white girl? And what is a dark skinned white girl?

I attended Families on the Fault Lines at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender this past week and aside from opening up a million new lines of questioning surrounding issues of race, kinship and care, I was particularly moved by a talk called “Mongels vs. Hybrids: Colorful Families in Post-racial Space” by Mitzi Carter who blogs over at what she calls “a blog for progressive mamas of color in the SF Bay Area”: Colorful Mamas. The idea of a “dark skinned white girl” has always been a really interesting topic for me and something that hits really close to home. I think it can be interpreted as specifically as bi-racial and as broadly as the confusion and ridicule a person of color might face when accused of being “white-washed” (as in, you don’t fit into narrow prescriptions of what someone of your race should act or talk like). I think “dark skinned white girls” (or “light skinned black girls” or guys for that matter!) generally aims to bring light to the issue of someone of mixed heritage.

Mitzi Carter spoke about mixed race families and her experience as a bi-racial Okinawan/black woman and as raising what she calls her “Cublinawan” or “Cubanese” children (Adorable pics after the jump!). Oftentimes she is confused as her daughter’s nanny. She was even questioned one time in a post office by a white woman (in a bougie part of Berkeley) about whether she should be “taking time off from work to do personal errands”!

This truly got me thinking about my own experience as a mixed race person and mixed race families in general. There is oftentimes much exoticism associated with (and, to be frank, fawning over) those whose phenotypes don’t allow easy categorization into distinct racial categories. For Mitzi Carter, while she was pregnant with her first child she faced people who literally obsessed over the potentially exotic and hybrid characteristics of her baby (“ooh Asian eyes and an afro!”). To be mixed race has definitely been a source of strife and confusion for many– even prompting hip-hop artist Murs’ to write the above quoted song “Dark Skinned White Girls.” (Love that he shouts out the pinays! Haaaay!)

It’s something I’ve faced growing up too but have had a hard time articulating. It seems we don’t talk a lot about it, but to be sure, there are distinct pains, complexities and privileges associated with mixed heritage people. And I’m realizing that these distinctions can be quite fruitful to discussions of race and gender. For I realized that mixed heritage families are a perfect example of “families on the fault lines.” In other words, mixed families undergo a unique experience that may reflect and reify notions of privilege and hierarchy. At the same time, they hold vast potential to resist narratives of the normalized body.

In my case, I’ve experienced both privilege and oppression with my identity and family background. For instance, while folks in the Filipino community might easily classify me as one of them, this isn’t the case for those outside this community. Filipinos are so underrepresented in the media and other forms of public representation that people don’t seem to understand what it means to be a dark-skinned Asian. They seem to only think of East Asia when they hear “Asian” (as if the region of Southeast Asia doesn’t exist!). I’ve gotten Latino, Chinese, Indian–you name it. (And to be fair, I’ve inherited some of my father’s bi-racial characteristics which further confounds people.) There’s a sort of erasure and concomitant exotification that occurs just by virture of being Filipino or any other underrepresented ethnic group.

On the other hand, there is a distancing from this Otherness that happens through my last name. I’m clearly not white, but my name–Anna Sterling–sure does sound white. It never fails as a conversation starter; by rote I explain that my paternal grandfather was an American soldier stationed in the Philippines during WWII. My father was bi-racial, hence the last name. I know for a fact that this last name has conferred privileges onto me throughout time–everywhere from fitting in with my white suburban friends a little bit more than those with more traditional names like Magpantay or Danganan to perhaps having eyes linger on my resume in job searches a few seconds longer.

Then again, I’m brought back to my physical appearance and the significance of it. My father married a full-blooded Filipina woman when he got to the states and as my mom says: “he fell in love with my native Filipina beauty!” My light-skinned father and “native-looking” mother (read: dark!) created a rainbow-colored spectrum of children. My other two sisters obtained my father’s light skin while I inherited my mother’s dark skin. It’s really sad to think about the policing I went through as a child: my own sisters would say I was dirty and that I needed to shower; family friends had the audacity to ask immediately upon seeing me “Did you just come from the pool? Why you so dark?!”; I’ve had people “compliment” me with, “You’d be so pretty if you weren’t so dark!” Even more, if you flipped your TV over to the Filipino channel, you’d be
shocked at the total whiteness of those given space in the media. No matter how many times I watch Filipino TV, the almost
geisha-whiteness of the actors and personalities continues to astound
me. It’s made strikingly clear– whiteness is beautiful. (In fact, so many of the most popular actors are half-white that I’m beginning to think it’s a prerequisite!) I absolutely hated my skin color growing up (and no wonder!). Another dark skinned friend of mine would literally wear turtlenecks in the blazing summer heat. And I’ll never forget the time I bitterly told my mom through clenched teeth, “I hate you for giving me this dark skin.” My mom wasn’t defensive and angry, but instead replied in the most gentlest way, conveying sadness and deep disappointment. Thinking of that breaks my heart.

Of course, it is this same dark skin that strengthens me today. The pain I felt growing up as a dark girl helped to push forward my present radical politicization. I love Tupac’s lyric: “Some say the darker the berry the sweeter the juice, I say the darker the flesh then the deeper the roots.” In a way, I really and honestly believe that. My dark skin (leave me in the sun for 30 minutes and no doubt, I’d be at least 3 shades darker) makes me feel connected to my indigenous roots despite the fact that this diaspora and my centrality within this belly-of-the-beast Babylon is all I know. And when I hear that 70% of Asian women are with white men and witness that very whitening out within my own family, I feel so damn proud of my dark ass skin.

But of course, these complex ways that I’ve negotiated my identity–my skin color, my Anglo last name, my family’s unique story of mixed heritage and the underrepresentation of Filipinos that still cause people to constantly marvel at me like I’m an exotic commodity–has been a struggle and a blessing and could not be contained in a single blog post. All of these experiences have led me to think deeply about what our racial identities mean. So I want to pose these questions to our commenters, as I know many of y’all have diverse backgrounds: In what ways have you been affected or disaffected by incongruent identities or mixed heritage backgrounds? (This goes for both mixed heritage children and mixed raced couples!) And as people continually choose to date outside their ethnic, racial or national communities, and for transnational folks who don’t fit neatly into ethnic categories, I want to pose the question–how do we go about building identities that may not be solidly race-based? What happens when our identities become more and more complicated?

Carter’s Cublinawan (or Cubanese!) kids:

And if you face the same ridiculous treatment Carter faces of being confused as your kid’s nanny, def check out this dope shirt right here!:

Buy it here.