Advanced Essay #1: Lydia Anderson

Introduction: I wrote this piece to help people understand my problems being a woman of color in a white southern family. Although I love my family, I have problems with them concerning issues of race. In this essay, my main goal was to highlight my relationship to them and show people a perspective on interracial families that is often now shown enough.

During February of 2015, my family and I went down to Virginia to spend Easter with my Aunt and Uncle. During the third or fourth day of our visit, my cousin Walter walked downstairs with a Nerf gun. He asked me to play nerf battle with him, to which I reluctantly agreed. He turns to my uncle and asked if he could get his terrorist hood. When Uncle Teddy replied yes, Walter ran upstairs and gets a green shirt, tying it around his face. His eyes were poking out of the neck hole of the shirt. Ruby and I look at our uncle in shock. He was just sitting there, laughing. I mention briefly to him that it was racist, to which he said that it was just something funny that Walter did. As I have gotten older, I cannot ignore these incidents with my white family, being one of the only black people in a family of white people. Family gatherings usually consist of all white people, along with my sister Ruby, my father and myself. I remember when I was four or five, when my Walter was born. Aunt Ann and Uncle Teddy, my grandmother and my mother all in my grandmother’s living room to welcome the baby. Being surrounded by my family with only my father and sister, wasn’t as weird as you think it would feel for a child. So from a young age I had grown accustomed to being surrounded by people who loved me but didn’t look like me. This left it on the shoulders of my almost non-existent black family to expose me to black culture.

Apart from my father and Aunt Helen I have no black relatives in my family. My dad was the only child, born to Ruby and Arthur Anderson, an older couple living in inner city Pittsburgh. My grandparents moved from Mobile, Alabama to Pittsburgh in the second wave of the Great Migration. They didn’t keep in contact with their families as there were few ways to do so. My Aunt Helen married my Great-Uncle Kenneth, a white relative. She is from Trinidad and I’ve only met her once. These things didn’t start to bother me until I was older. When the Trayvon Martin case really began to get a lot of national attention, it was a heated debate topic amongst my immediate family. We, being my parents and sister, agreed that George Zimmerman should be indicted and found guilty. All of us followed the case and discussed it avidly during dinner, each of us chiming in with our opinions. When we talked about it, I knew it was an issue that uniquely affected my sister, father and I more than it would my mother. She didn’t have to experience that fear that comes with being a black person watching these cases. Although she could relate them to my father, worrying about him and how he would survive around police officers, she never had that fear that we had of police officers handling us. The Trayvon Martin case was really the first time I really remember feeling like I was really different from most of my family. With all that has happened in the years since the Trayvon Martin case, I have become uniquely aware of who I am in American Society and how my experiences as a woman of color will be different from my white family members. What I’ve always wanted to do is find the space to explain to them my situation in a way that wouldn’t make them get defensive. In everyday life, I don’t concern myself with explaining oppression to white people. When I used to explain, it always ended up with them saying something about this is America reverse racism blah blah blah. But it’s different with my family. I want them to understand and be able to play their part in the movement. Being a black woman in a family of white people, makes me feel like I should be able to explain to help them, like it’s my job to include them in my experiences. Today, despite my best efforts to the contrary, I still feel like a welcome stranger in my family.