Irish/Italian | Dominican
For a long time I didn't even mention my Italian or Irish heritage. My Dad was just White. Weird because my name is probably the most common Italian name. I've always been proud of my Dominican heritage and have finessed my response to confused questions of whether I speak Spanish or those that minimise its existence because they've never heard of it before. Only in my 30s have I begun to explore my identity in terms of whether I want to identify as mixed-race or Black. Still something I'm unsure of. I want to make sure I'm identifying for myself and not for the sake of politics or how I appear to others.
As a child I was totally oblivious to being mixed or race in any form. Fast forward to secondary school and I became aware. University was a particularly challenging time in hindsight. Then the growing pains of entering the professional world where you encounter racism more frequently and how it operates in the everyday. I work for myself and one of the reasons I do is because I found the workplaces I had worked in were too slow in catering to different identities. I always felt homogenised in offices and it numbed me to the point of boredom and rebellion.
I've struggled with self-acceptance, a rite of passage for any human growing up, that has left me feeling vulnerable about what others 'expect' me to be as a mixed-race female, especially when it comes to dating and relationships. I'm over sexualised often and have felt like a trophy girlfriend, or generally misunderstood in a lot of my relationships. It's not something I've completely reconciled, simply because racism and prejudice still exist in the world we live in, plus choosing a partner can be so complex. But I understand that it is much of a personal journey as it is a societal one. Sometimes you have no idea what a person is truly like until you encounter a hardship or shared experience that reveals yourself and them. Often it's about upbringing and how there's has differed to mine. But sometimes it can be differences in their diet, music they're into, their social circles, or how they clean a bathroom, that speaks volumes about who they are as a person.
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