by Alina Willis
Embedded Files
published Fall 2018
I think that my ancestors are looking down at me from heaven, and I hope that they're smiling. It wasn't like it is now when they were kids; they went to segregated high schools in the South in the late 1920's, nearly ninety years parallel to my education. I attend a very different type of high school than they did, in a little town in New Hampshire where everyone knows each other. There are no gangs, and so little crime that a thief in a gas station is seen as a newsworthy story. And in a school that is 98% white, I am a biracial student of color.
The year is 2018, and we as a country still have trouble accepting the idea of interracial marriage. A few years ago, a post on the social media site Twitter by Old Navy featured an interracial couple and child and people were livid. Others may remember the famed Cheerio commercial featuring a multiracial little girl and her parents that caused severe backlash. Why do I have yet to see a family like mine on television? While strides have been made on public television in the area of diversity, I am still waiting for that day. Yes, more people are certainly accepting, but there is a limit to their acceptance. Most people consider mixed children as "cute," and they dream of having little babies with light hair, tan skin, and white features, but they fail to see the fact that all mixed people are different. Some of us look white, some of us have thick hair, some of us have darker skin, and some of us are in between, but we don't all have blue eyes. We are not a hybrid for the world to admire or stare at in disdain.
Before I decided to attend this school, my mom asked if I was going to be okay. She asked me if I would rather go to school in Manchester, where I wouldn't feel too out of place. I told her that I was going to be fine, and that students needed to see like me at school. I mean, I wasn't looking for any Ruby Bridges type integration--that would be naive to think that it would still be like that. Civil rights activists, including my grandfather, fought so that it wouldn't be like that, even in the North, when our schools weren't technically segregated. But students--kids like me--are the future. We are the epitome of what the mixing pot of America will become. And even if it doesn't seem so, the rest of the world doesn't look like Bow High School. According to Pew Research Center's article titled, "Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse, and Growing in Numbers," the U.S Census Bureau reported that in 2013, 9 million Americans have filled in the "two or more races" bubble or "the other" bubble. It was less than fifty years ago when the U.S Supreme Court deemed interracial marriage legal, in the Loving v. Virginia court case, and it has only been a little more than fifteen years since the United States allowed us to fill out more than one bubble on census records.
But then again, I wrote this article because I wanted to talk about my experience individually, despite the benefits of hiding behind a collective perspective. I wanted to open up a conversation about race in a school like Bow High School, so that when we leave this comfortable little bubble, we are able to look at the world with multiple perspectives and an open heart. I believe that our school is becoming more diverse as time goes on, and that makes me feel like we are heading in a positive direction.
I still hear some statements that will make me feel small sometimes, and I'll go home and it'll keep nagging at me for hours, burning a hole in my head, wishing that I'd done more to defend myself and my culture. Despite this, however, I see our community growing more colorful in the future, and who knows, maybe there will be no need for a World's Fair some day, because the world will simply be all around us.
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