“Black people don’t want me, but also white people don’t want me,”

Aviva Addo was working at Simons when she noticed a Black man staring at her, confused. 

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m half white, half Black.”

The man scoffed. “Really?”

His girlfriend smacked his arm. “That’s rude!”

It may be rude, but Addo has heard it before. With a white mother and a father from Ghana, Addo’s looks are unique: tan skin, brown eyes and brown hair that’s “more manageable” than her sisters. She admits she could be called “racially ambiguous.” 

“Not a lot of people (can) right off the bat say that I’m half white, half Black.”

When people see Addo with her red-haired, pale-skinned, blue-eyed mother, they often wonder what the relationship is. “They think I’m adopted,” she says. Addo has step-siblings who are white and she says they’re usually seen as her mom’s kids before she is.

“They’ll question, ‘Oh, what’s the relation?’ And my mom says, ‘Oh, these are my daughters.’ Then they look and they’re like ‘How is that possible?’ My mom always has to say, ‘Oh, they have a Black dad.’”

It’s not unusual to come across a mixed-race person in Canada. However, people are often unaware of the challenges that they might experience. The biggest challenge people of mixed-race face is fitting into racialized communities.

“I kind of get put in a gray area because Black people don’t want me, but also white people don’t want me,” Addo says. 

“Why do you have to judge us? Like, it’s not our fault that we came out biracial.”

Khalaila Pioker-Penddah, who also has a white mother and Ghanaian father and presents as a light-skinned Black person, says the same thing. While she finds that older Black people treat her better because of her lighter skin, she finds the younger generation treats her more negatively.

“Because they’ve [been] trying to deconstruct the colourism that they saw through their parents and grandparents, it’s almost as if they don’t like me because they see the things that their grandparents would try to push them to do in me, like skin whitening.”

Pioker-Penddah also finds it hard to make friends since she notices that “races tend to stick with each other.”

“You kind of end up in a situation where it’s hard to make friends because you can’t really slot into a group seamlessly.”

Due to these experiences, Pioker-Penddah identifies less with her African side. “I’m just Canadian. The whole country is a melting pot anyway.”

Addo, on the other hand, struggles with her identity. “I’ve struggled knowing where I stand… not knowing where I belong. I tend to worry [if] people think I’m white passing because of my hair and I’m very fairly light.”

She wants others to understand that mixed-race people have their own set of struggles. “I find a lot of Black people [are] like, ‘oh, you don’t go through struggles like me. You can’t relate to us.’ But yet we do go through our own set of struggles. We go through a lot of identity crises… take in mind that we have two that we have to understand.”

She also wishes people would not act confused that mixed-race kids exist. “There’s actually a lot of us out there.”

Pioker-Penddah has similar thoughts, saying that others should treat mixed-race people the same way they would treat any other person. “Don’t be weird about it. I get that I’m not a full-blooded African child, but I still have to deal with the same crap you do. If I walk into a store and you’re worried that you’re gonna get followed, I’m probably getting followed around too. I have the same negative experiences as you.”

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Graphic by Forrester Toews