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Original Essay: completed for Soc 101

            Where are you from? Effortlessly pulling out the pre-rehearsed words, I recite: “I’m half Trinidadian, half Indian; I was born in England but I grew up in New York”. They pause and process. They can wrap their heads around England and New York: that’s unique, but understandable. They even register half-Indian due to the caramel skin tone and dark hair. Yet I can almost always hear the conceivable mental-stumble as they arrive at Trinidadian. I explain to them that it’s an island in the Caribbean. Others innocently inquire if I’m “half black” and I explain to them, no, my mother’s roots are mixed but mainly Indian. Others still insist then, that, “I’m just Indian.” My friends, for a good laugh and a time saving measure, coined me “Trindian”. I actually thoroughly enjoy opportunities to explain Trindia to a newcomer, yet I’m left to wonder why people are so eager to fit me into a familiar standard of “just Indian”. Where exactly does a multiracial identity fit in society? Where in this world is Trindia?

 

            My mother is from a ferociously proud breed of polouri-loving, cricket-watching Trinidadians. Trini’s are known to have an enormous amount of pride in their tiny nation, from their Nobel Prize laureates and multiple Miss World Titles to the World Cup qualifiers and Olympic gold medalists. They do pretty well for a country with a population less than that of Manhattan. My mother grew up, the second youngest of seven, in a well-established and well-respected family in Chaguanas. Despite their Trinidadian identities, they were Hindu and had strong ties to their roots in India. Therefore, when my mother decided to go to medical school, her father persuaded her to do so in India. In Pondicherry, a formerly French part of India, she met my father, who was raised in New Delhi. They moved to England for their residencies and eventually to New York. All the while, my mother retained her strong sense of pride in her true home and often yearned to go back to the warm beaches and smell of doubles and polouri wafting over the hammocks tied to coconut trees. Much of my family is still in Trinidad, while others have migrated to Florida or settled in boroughs of New York City.

 

              I grew up alongside many cultural influences that have made me come to appreciate many different identities. I went to Catholic school for three years, despite my Hindu beliefs, yet the town I grew up in was predominantly Jewish. Essentially this amounted to knowing how to count prayers on a rosary yet attending more Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s than I can count on my hands. It meant transitioning from seeing Christmas trees to menorahs speckle living room windows in holiday times. All of these aspects made me appreciate my friends’ diverse cultures, and my own, even more. I reveled in any opportunity to immerse myself into the richness of someone else’s heritage. Yet despite all this diversity and culture this country has founded itself upon, it still confounds me when people cannot understand cultures can intersect in the sanctity of marriage. Different races can and do marry and have multiracial children.

 

            Multiracial identities are still at odds with the comfortable norms of our society. I grew up in such a privileged society that I never felt the sting of discrimination, yet there is an undeniable discomfort that arises from the inability to fit someone exactly into a recognizable race. If you look or seem more like one ‘half’ of your identity, people are eager to associate you with it. For me, many want to see me as “just Indian”, due to a darker skin tone. For my Latina friend who grew up in Scarsdale with me, many see her as “just Jewish” although her mother is a Spanish Christian. According to your surrounding influences, overall appearance and the preconceived notion of the person judging you, the developed societal instinct is to stereotype you into a familiar, recognizable label. Even in media we witness African American couples and white couple, for example. Rarely in advertisements, television shows or music videos do we see interracial couples. This is an accurate reflection of the mindset of our society today. Even though we are accepting of individual races, we still have trouble accepting the actual products of interracial marriage: the multiracial children themselves.

 

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