Did you have any difficulty growing up as a mixed Afrolatina and relating to your African American side? I know most of my friends had a hard time but was it different then than it is now?
Hol' up, hol' up, anon! I'm not sure of how you came to this, but I am not mixed, I am not biracial, I am not ethnically ambiguous, I am not a "5 percenter"....I AM BLACK! I may be a little light-skinnedededed ๐ฅด๐คฃ, but, like many light-skinned Blacks, I don't know, nor do I care where my fair complexion comes from. I am a mono-racial Black woman. I was born in New York City to two Black Nicaraguan parents, both of whom speak Spanish as a first language, they both have Caribbean accents and Jewish last names. And even though I was born in this country, I don't actually identify as "African-American" mainly because I don't feel like the term fully describes who I am (to me, it erases my Latinaness and my Caribbeaness). It also represents a culture, heritage, history, and understanding that I don't have. I mean, it ain't like I can say I got family and roots in Mississippi and grew up on collard greens and cornbread. I also feel like a lot of people use this term to put ALL people of the African descent under the same umbrella: for instance, I once heard someone refer to Naomi Campbell as an "African-American" model, and I thought "No she ain't!" She is a Black British woman of Jamaican heritage. So, me personally, I just say I am Black, if people want to know more about me, they can just ask. But to answer your question, HELL NAH...I've never had a problem with my Blackness...ever. I loooove being Black. I bask in it. I know a lot negroes that live past the Rio Grande do, and it's a damn shame, but that was not my experience. I'm very aware and proud of my Blackness. In fact, it was much easier, and honestly, more comfortable for me to gravitate toward people who look like me growing up (i.e. Black Americans). Mind you, even though my parents are Hispanics, I did not grow up speaking the language myself, I'd never been to the country until my teens, and of course I'm Black, so I didn't look like most of the Latinos I saw on TV (who all looked Italian to me). To be honest, it was harder to accept that I was Latina because I just didn't fit into what most people think of Latinos. Sometimes I even felt embarrassed of my Hispanic heritage. I mean, I felt Hispanic around my family and inside my own home, but once I left those 4 walls, I did at times feel like an outsider because people didn't understand that Black folks like me existed.
