Growing Up in the "Mixie" Millennium

A recent article published in Toronto Life, “A New Mixed-raced Generation is Transforming the City: Will Toronto Be the World’s First Post-racial Metropolis?” takes the ever-increasing wave of mixed-race children, marriages, and culture emerging in Toronto head on.

While the article is a very interesting and quality read, especially for a mixed-race person like me, it also highlights the fact that this is a rather untouched subject for a metropolitan city like Toronto, whose motto is “Diversity Our Strength”, and that perhaps there is a discussion to be had.

“Returning to Toronto always comes with a palpable sense of relief, [for those who are mixed]” writer for Toronto Life, Nicholas Hune-Brown says, and boy is he ever correct. Whenever my family would make our voyages up to Peterborough, Ontario for our camping weekends, I knew that the feeling of being visibly different would haunt me until we returned back to the “Welcome to Toronto” sign. My dad was the only black man in the whole of Red Setter Resort, and everyone knew that my sisters and I, with our curly and “ethnic” hair that people loved to fawn over, and touch, were his children.

It wasn't people knowing that I was his child that bothered me. It was the fact that people didn't have to guess, the fact that the only mystery people ever had to solve was figuring out why my sisters and I looked so different. Although this case often closed the moment they saw my white brunette mother arm in arm with my dad.

The other thing that worked against me was that my dad was Guyanese, which, although considered part of the West Indies, is located in South America. This allowed me to play with my response to, “What is your background?” The question that like Hune-Brown writes, “Every mixed person is subjected to.” I would often say “My father is South American, and my mother is Scottish.” You would not believe the ooos and ahhhs that this response would get. People would begin listing off all sorts of Latin countries in South America; most often starting with either Venezuela or Brazil, only to be let down, for whatever reason, by the fact that I wasn't half-Latin; I was half-black.

I can even recall visiting the pool with my sister, and upon our arrival, this girl started singing "Window to the Wall", as if to say, "The black people are here. Time to be cool." I laughed, even at the age of eleven at how ignorant it was to assume that rap would be our common ground, especially since I was going through my rock phase and really had no clue where the window or the wall was. 

Now, at the age of twenty, I look back on my journey growing up in the new millennium as what Hune-Brown calls a “mixie”. Despite the challenges of properly identifying myself, I see that a majority of the challenges I had were largely self-inflicted. I felt that because everything was either black or white, pun very intended; that I too had to be either black or white.

While it is comforting to know that there has been a drastic increase of mixed-race marriages, children, and cultural influences, I cannot help but feel that I missed out on the wide acceptance that has been on the rise as of recent. I do, however feel that by growing up a generation ahead of the new wave of “mixies”, that perhaps I was a pioneer in making a name for ourselves in Toronto.

Ultimately, it is my pleasure to have sacrificed enjoying the newly opened minds and acceptance throughout the first half of my life. Especially if it means seeing even more racially ambiguous children gallivanting around the city, sinking their teeth into life entirely unconcerned with committing to being “either or”.

The fact that we have been granted the option, although a little overdue if you ask me, of choosing more than once race on national censuses, is a sign that as a society we are progressing. Not only in terms of racial identification, but sexual identification, gender identification, and everything in between, because as we have come to learn, there is a lot “in between”. The more we embrace that, the more we allow these “in-betweeners”, like myself, to flourish, ultimately making our city in all of its multicultural glory, a better place.