Where #ImFrom: Swinging identities
By: Aj
Tags: Race, Florida, Im From, Biracial, Identity

By Christopher James

Florida, where I grew up, is an entrapping place. It might be the humidity, the cheap rent or the many minimum-wage jobs, but people who move there tend to stay there, and I don’t think it’s purely by choice.

The state can seem like never-ending suburban sprawl where people often lead isolated, secluded lives. The culture is really centered around that mentality — I’m gonna do me, and you do you.

Courtesy photo: Christopher James, center, with his friends in 1996 in Florida.

That environment can be hard when you’re a biracial kid with divorced parents. My mom is white and my dad is black, and I’ve had to straddle those two cultures, sometimes awkwardly.

But I don’t talk about any of that in LA, where I now live, and where I often get the question, “Where are you from?” I’ve noticed most people don’t seem to have a great desire to delve into subtlety and nuance. I’m one thing to one group and another to the next.

A lot of my white friends seem to see me as a protector because they lack a large circle of black friends, or are unfamiliar with the black experience in America. I’m happy to be a bridge and alter popular conceptions of black men in traditional media. But I honestly crave people who don’t look at me like a bridge, a ribbon or an outlier, but rather as an individual.

When I go back to Florida, I’m usually greeted with mocking questions asking if I’ve gone “full Hollywood” or if I’m “too educated” for people back here — as if I’ve forgotten where I’m from.

Deep down I’m bothered by those comments. They seem to betray a certain anxiety and fear about my time away from them, as if it’s going to change me into some cable news stereotype. It seems the longer I spend apart from the people I know, the greater the gulf between us.

In Los Angeles, I’m often in a college-educated social circle, which is predominantly white, yet I’ve never felt at home there. I can hold long conversations on politics, sports, art or culture at any party. I know how to make people feel comfortable and let down their guard. But I often feel uneasy in those settings because when I look around, I rarely see anyone who resembles me in my physical appearance.

Even more unnerving is the weird, unconscious energy in those situations, where racial issues are OK to know about, but not to openly discuss. I sense it’s so people can protect themselves against a danger perceived as even greater than racism: white guilt.

And I have some of that myself. I’ve avoided traps that ensnare large numbers of young black men: drugs, poverty, early fatherhood. Sometimes I realize, with a few altered details, I could have become one of those statistics.

That I’ve avoided that fate makes me feel very lucky but also very guilty. Not for avoiding those traps, but for cowering away from bringing the issue of racial discrimination up, all in an effort to blend in and keep the real boogeyman in the closet — the white guilt I hold inside myself.

This is part of a series called #ImFrom, where members of the AJ+ community share personal stories about the question, “Where are you from?”