How to Embrace Our Own Multi-Ethnic Heritages
“…the peoples of our past and the countries of our origins tell us a story of who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.”
Photo by Janelle Pol
I was a self-described mutt for a good portion of my life.
When someone asked about my heritage, I’d hem and haw, unsure of how to answer. I most often staked claims to my father’s Scottish background, including my very Scottish-sounding (maiden) name and my family’s propensity toward frugality.
My mother’s background, however, sometimes felt like one big game of Guess Who? with twenty-four cartoon-faced cards splayed out between my opponent and me, the correct choice anyone’s guess. My mother was adopted, and since open adoptions didn’t come on the scene until the ‘60s and ‘70s, we didn’t know her biological heritage at the time. We guessed that her red hair might involve nods to the Irish, since she had a flair for Saint Patrick’s Day and a fond hankering for corned beef and cabbage.
If I’m honest, though, my heritage – whether real or imagined – didn’t mean a whole lot to me because I was white. As I write about in my book, The Color of Life, I didn’t think issues of race, as well as my own racial, ethnic and cultural background, mattered a whole lot because white wasn’t a color. I thought of it as a “bland, neutral tone, the lone hue in a rainbow palate that doesn’t fit into a category, for it is a category in and of itself”¹. But clinging to these false and ignorant beliefs wasn’t doing anyone any good, not for me as an individual, nor for the millions of folks in our country who also claim a European American heritage.
After all, none of us is a mutt. Instead, the peoples of our past and the countries of our origins tell a story of who we’ve been and who we’re becoming. Getting to know the roots of our myriad heritages is a gift of the past, the legacy of our coupled ancestries one is to receive with open hands, if we so choose.
DISCOVERING COLOR
Of course, change didn’t happen overnight, but eventually the color palette of my life began to take on a different hue.
I remember sitting in church one Sunday and listening as the preacher exhorted the audience to delight in diversity, since God had delighted in diversity since the beginning of time.
“Black! White! Asian! Latino!” the preacher called out, her fingers pointing holy pistols toward heaven as excitement welled in her soul. “You, my friends,” she said, “need to know that God delights in each one of you, in every shade under the sun!”
I often walk through urban neighborhoods in Oakland, California, the city I now call home. Its grittiness is similar to the streets and boroughs of New York City, and I often find myself wondering if I could live in a place that doesn’t delight in the beauty of diversity.
“Once you live in a diverse place,” a friend once told me, “it’s hard not to live in a diverse place later on down the road.” For me, once I began to see and celebrate, honor and learn from a world of diversity around me, I couldn’t help but do the same in my own life, examining and giving wild head nods toward my own ethnic heritage.
DISCOVERING MY HERITAGE
But more than anything, I remember how change happened when I fell in love with my husband, who happens to identify as black. And when two beautiful boys eventually entered our world, I found myself wanting to examine and honor both sides of their mixed-race heritage. When I started doing my homework about my husband’s side of the family, I couldn’t help but do the same on my side of the family, too.
Originally, I thought I was “doing the work” for the benefit of my husband and our sons. In reality, I needed to learn to decenter tightly-held notions of whiteness and instead cling to the roots of my heritage. After all, I’m not a mutt, but I come from a glorious, wild, resilient kind of people, from truth-tellers who bear the stamp of my humanity and whisper that I should do the same.
And really, I couldn’t be prouder if I tried.
¹Taken from The Color of Life (p.29)
Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker and activist from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book, The Color of Life, released in 2019 (Zondervan). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as her website.