German/Polish | Cameroonian
The last time I cried was during a 10-year anniversary event of a scholarship program I participated in. A singer sang the song ‘Nie wieder leise’ (Never silent again) by Celina Bostic, which is about how ‘we’ (meaning Bipocs in Germany) used to always swallow everything bad that has been said about us and how we will no longer be silent. The line that made me cry was ‘I used to look for false friends who would not understand anything and who would make jokes at my cost’, because it reminded me of the many times I thought I was friends with and trusted a person, who eventually would not defend me when I would experience degradation or would even agree with the racists remarks made. Though after all that the let downs I experienced, I thought I would never trust again. But I know all of my friends know of the importance of solidarity as they have experienced some form of marginalization as well and can relate to my experiences. But just as said in the song, I will now no longer seek validation from people and accommodate myself for them, because I no longer care anymore if I'm being validated by someone.
Racial categories simply do not include mixed people, and since we exist, our sheer existence is a deconstruction of a concept that was created to place Whiteness above. It has put me in an identity crisis when I lived in the USA and was treated as part of the country. I asked myself how it was possible that when I was an actual foreigner I was included more and treated better (as a Black person in the USA!) than all my life in my native country Germany? I asked myself how I can be born in Germany, have a German passport and I'm even of ‘German ethnicity’, and still have had my high school teacher refer to me not by my name but by ‘unsere Ausländerin’ (our foreigner)? Only now that I live in my fourth country (The Netherlands) I have developed a cosmopolitan identity and being considered somewhat foreign now actually matches how I feel, and I am much happier feeling cosmopolitan than single-cultured.
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