On being mixed....or should I say multicultural third world kid

I was never confused when it came to answer the question "what am i?",  I never really gave it a thought  to be honest. I was born into a rainbow family where everyone was different, from a different place with a different skin shade. We had whites, mulatos, cocoa, chocolate, ebony, cafe au lait, porcelain, everything.  Most were black while me and my sister were light skinned, but no one was resentful or made us feel this difference. Until 6 colors only existed when painting.

After the civil war I was forced to attend a all white school in which for the first time I was confronted with discrimination and racism. I could not be European because my skin was too dark. I always ended with the villain roles when playing because I was the darkie. My teacher threw away the flowers I had given her on Teacher's day because I was dark and nasty to her.



Fast forwarded to high school where I was surrounded by mixed people and finally understood that I was different from their kind of mixed. My mom was not white or black nor was my father. I did not have a white and black side in my family. We were all black.
I did not struggle in adapting into two families, juggling traditions of different cultures. I was a mixed kid in another way.  My great grandfather who was white never raised my grandma and his sons with his wife, rejected my grandma because she was black. On my dad's side, it was a mix of capeverdians and Portuguese, who somewhere along the line had disappeared in the memories. Both sides  married africans and gave birth to rainbow children of all shades.

I am mixed but in a different way, I struggled also to find my place in this world. I was brought by lusophones, studied in french and lived in french west Africa most of my life. I define myself as a black woman from french west Africa with originis in lusophone Africa, and i am proud of what I have become. Even more proud of a family that made it through everything and is multiculutural