there’s a trinidadian singer named kes. my dad really likes his music, and i do as well. my first chosen name that really felt like me was keslar. it’s not my first name anymore. only my high school friends call me that, so i don’t hear it much. their nickname for me is kes.

i don’t always feel accepted by my family, namely my parents. my dad’s side is very catholic and most of them don’t know im trans. none of them know my name is kes. sometimes i worry that i’ll never be truly accepted by them as a real trini, for a lot of reasons.

Post 123: Multiracial Representation

Kehlani

Corporate America loves to talk about diversity. They love it so much they’ve turned it into a buzzword, a marketing campaign, and a shield against accountability. But here’s the thing: when diversity becomes a performance instead of a practice, it stops serving the people it was meant to uplift and starts serving the institutions trying to protect their image. Let’s talk about what happens when…

(And Ethnically Ambiguous)

I feel like my identity being mixed is kind of odd. I’m triracial while most people you see in media and such are biracial. So basically, I’m extra mixed. And it’s weird because some people probably perceive me as African-American and I am. But also, only a fourth of my heritage is African-American. And I also get told that I look like other things and I’m probably ethnically ambiguous.

When I was born, my mom (white) was a bit surprised that I came out looking really Asian. In my baby pictures, I just look like a Southeast Asian little girl with spiky pigtails and crescent moon eyes. My dad is half-and-half, African-American and Southeast Asian (mostly Chinese and Thai). But of course as an adult, he looks Blasian or maybe Puerto Rican, slightly smaller curls, light brown skin, freckles, wide thai nose, kinda tall, muscular guy.

Once I was a little kid and my hair turned into very thick waves, a lot of people spoke to me in Spanish, or thought that I was from Polynesia. I did have a cultural group where I was around a lot of Hawaiians and I fit in very well with them. I’ve been told a story about being around five or six and us walking into a big room of Hawaiian people and me being very excited because “Everyone here looks like me,” which apparently had never happened before.

But I’m not Hawaiian. I’m mixed, hapa, hafu, triracial, multiracial. I rarely use one title.

I have connections to my Asian heritage, but much less than I would like. And even though I am just as Asian as I am Black, no one knows that until I tell them. I sort of wish my eyes hadn’t rounded with age, the crescent’s were very cute on toddler-me & now no one knows I’m asian even though it’s a whole 4th of my ethnicity. If we go by factions, I’m technically the most white. But no one in their right mind is going to think that I’m white presenting. Everyone used to mistake my Mom for my nanny.

So I think I developed a sort of general “brown” identity. I’d heard Middle Eastern people and other not-as-easily-census-classifiable groups being called brown, and I was occasionally assumed Middle Eastern. Latinas were brown; I also get mistaken for Latina(Metiza)/Afro Latina.

So yeah, brown girl who no one understands the background of. It’s chill.

────୨ৎ──── When I was told by other mixed people that I 'wasn't mixed enough', I realised everyone was just out for themselves.