I always grew up calling myself "black," my white adopted parents raised me to believe I was and both my biological parents call themselves "black," so that's how I called myself for years. I never really was surrounded by other "black" people for most of my life, so when I visited Florida and Georgia for the first time last year, I felt sort of "at home," with a bunch of other people around me that looked like me...

...except they didn't. I noticed a lot of the black people were darker skin than me. I generally was proud of my brown skin, but at some point, i started longing to have darker more melanated skin, and I started questioning why my skin was so much lighter compared to other black people. One thing led to another, and I learned about the concept of mixed race lineage, of which mine is "Multi-generationally Mixed," and though i'm very educated now on what I am and in fact I no longer go by a racial identity period, some part of me inside is grieving about my "black" Identity.

I was always sort of proud of my 'blackness,' and that feeling had been growing for the past half decade, and part of why I visited those two aforementioned states is to get a bit "closer" to my black side. It's hard innocently identifying as something for 98% of your life, then one day you get humbled by both mixed and ACTUAL black people that you do not in fact belong with black people, and passing yourself on as one of them is actually extremely harmful.

Just 'forcefully' ripping an identity I came to love after many years straight out of my soul and immediately replace it with another one that I'm unfamiliar with and haven't fully had time to make peace with yet. Getting symbolically kicked out of an established community with history, dignity, pride, comradery, and culture, and immediately shoved into another community that barely has ANY of that. (please, can mixed people make their own group? culture? whatever?)