Reply to WWYD-nationality on app? mixed DD, Black African dad/White European Mom,Passport -Mom’s Ctry

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do you have to have black friends to identify as black?[/quote]

No, but it does indicate a lack of identifying as being black if all your friends are white, and your own mom has no clue whether you identify as black.  [/quote]

OP here. This makes no sense. You make your friends based on your racial identity not based on who you get along with and who you like? I think this is an American thing and cannot be applied across the board. My husband has mostly white friends and he is black. By this reckoning he identifies as white? This is preposterous. I genuinely think my daughter does not give her race much thought at all.[/quote]

No, I don't make my  friends based on racial identity and that's why I have friends of all races.  I too make my friends based on who I get along with and like, and it's telling that a black/biracial person living in America (with all its diversity) only gets along with and likes white people.  [/quote]

OP here. How does “all her friends are  white translate to “ONLY likes and gets along with”? You are putting too much stock on racial identity and that is American issue by and large. Many things go to how one comes about ones friends. It does not have to come down to an aversion to one race and an affinity for another.  It could be her neighborhood, who she sat next to at school on her first day and who their friends are that eventually make up a group, who is on her sports team, and many more. It needn’t be a race thing.

As a matter of fact, coincidentally, this issue came up yesterday evening. As we were cleaning up after some dinner guests had left, I asked her how she identifies racially and whether race played a part in how she came about her group of friends. She said that was the second time she had been asked to think about race that day. The guests we had had over were an African family and apparently the son had asked her whether there were any cute black girls at her school.  She told me that she never ever consciously thought of anyone’s race, not even her own. She said she had been confused for a moment after the son asked her the question because she had to stop and think who in her class was “black” because she says she never sees people in that way. She likened mine and the guest’s question to being asked who in her class wears  trousers and who wears skirts and with which group she identifies. It mattered so little to her that she had to pause and think about it. 
My husband also says that he never about his color and put it down to growing up on a country where colour was not ever an issue because the majority of people looked like him. As a result his color did not have a bearing on anything that happened to him or whatever choices he made. We concluded that since we both brought that background into our home, it had been inherited by our daughter. Color/race just is not an issue in our family. [/quote]

She benefits from the white privilege of never having to have thought much about race. Others never had that privilege from day one.[/quote]

This is the OP. So a half black and half white child can benefit from white privilege in a country where she is seen as black? Right. 
She came here aged 11 and she Is now 16. She does not have the ‘benefit’ of having yet absorbed the history of America but you cannot impute an American mindset  into her mind when it does not exist there. It seems you are somehow blaming her for not thinking like someone who was raised here as a mixed race or black person and therefore she has not earned the ‘privilege’ of calling herself black where that label might, and only might, grant her some benefit.

Anyway, I believe I have my answer from all the helpful responses and we will act accordingly in a way that will be most beneficial to her in the application process just like everybody else-black and white and yellow and red will be doing. [/quote]

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