Essay On African American Identity

I’m one of those people who look racially ambiguous. There are a lot of us: Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Steph Curry, to name a few. Aside from exceptional athletic and speaking abilities (and obvious sense of sarcasm), another thing I believe I have in common with those three is that we were all asked at one point, the infamous question, “What are you?”. Though to some it may be considered an intrusive or patronizing question, I do not mind it at all. As it allows me to discuss my ethnic background in such great detail that the listener often has to feign interest all throughout my spiel, which can be quite amusing. In short, my father is a white American and my mother a black Brazilian, which makes me a latino, biracial African American.

However, during my time in college at The George Washington University, I began to realize that singularity is overrated, and that it is possible to incorporate all elements of my racial and ethnic background into something cohesive, meaningful, yet still African American. For most of my life I had difficulty fully internalizing my African American identity and so it was only when detached from that community and placed at GW, that the identity became solidified and complete. Although there is a decent amount of diversity, the student body at GW is less than ten percent African American. And so whether it is in class discussions about race and poverty, or in my social life on campus, it has become clear over the years I spent at GW, that my experience has been predominantly an African American experience, as the contrast between myself and my friends and colleagues at GW has made abundantly clear. However, this new black identity is not exclusionary. Because I still feel that my white and Latino backgrounds constitute essential parts of my identity. Unlike before, where I desperately vacillated between different identities looking for acceptance, there was harmony at