Guest post by Rena.  Rena is a long time reader and fan of IDW.  This is her personal experience with interracial dating and family. I’m the daughter of an Italian man. My grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 40’s and my father was born and raised here in this beautiful country of diversity. On the outside, he was a great guy, life of the party, had a diverse group of friends and was friendly toward everyone from everywhere. He married my mother, who is German and French and little bit of some other stuff in between. I never heard my father really say a bad word about anyone or treat anyone any differently because of their race. We were liberal when liberal wasn’t cool. I’ve dated white, African-American, Hispanic, Pilipino, and Armenian. I mean, who’s really “white” anymore anyway?

Unless you can track your family tree back to Adam and Eve, you’re talking blindly if you think you’re “white”. White is a color in the palette, a check box on a form and an ignorant belief system formed from hatred and nothing else. Period. In March of 1999, I was pregnant. My family seemed excited on the outside, but I could feel the tension within my father and his family. In November of 2000, I had my son. The most important day of my entire life, and my father, the man I adored and idolized and his entire family disowned me. Not because I was single, not because I was a bad person, or going to be a horrible mother, but because they didn’t agree with “mixing of the races”. In the blink of an eye, half of my family was gone. All that I am, all that I was going to be was deduced to a “nigger lover”. These are the words that were screamed in a church at my aunt’s funeral before I arrived. I was not even welcome at a funeral. I said my prayer for her in private, alone and I’ve never spoken to any one of them since. Once I was over the pain of rejection, it turned to pure anger. I was angry at the audacity my father had to be a racist when he himself was a minority. He grew up watching his own parents victimized by racists coming here from Italy because they weren’t “white” and yet somehow through his own experiences, he himself became a racist and I never knew it. Aunts and uncles that I adored and who helped raise me, literally turned their heads in shame of me. I was horrified….who were these people that I called my family? It’s been 7 years since then. My father has never seen a photo of my son and has never heard his voice. As strange as it is, I don’t miss him. I’ve never wondered about him and I’ve never felt the need to make amends for the sake of “the family”. Make amends for what? It’s not like I peed on the table at a family reunions three-sheets to the wind; I had a baby. I’ve always felt that trying to make amends would somehow condone his warped views on racism and excuse his behavior for which there is no excuse. I realized pretty quickly that raising any child is difficult, but raising a bi-racial child has special challenges for a white woman. I expected glances, I expected snickers from strangers or the occasional, “what’s he mixed with?” as casually as if they were asking for directions. I expected people to assume he wasn’t mine or that I was the babysitter…..yes, that’s happened. I’ve had white men interested and then just as quickly do a 180 degrees when they realize I have a bi-racial child. What I never expected and hit me like a mac truck driving down a Texas highway was that my own blood would basically tell me my son wasn’t good enough to be a part of their family. I know now that blood is not thicker than color, not for a racist. This was my dad, a man I adored and he dismissed me from his life as if I were a severed employee. Mixed race children are increasing every year from many different ethnic groups. It’s so increasingly prevalent today that our own government can’t truly measure it. They’re running out of boxes to check in the race box, honestly. What’s even harder is the children who live with the knowledge of knowing their history and heritage yet can’t find a box to check on a form to fully tell it and express it. As my son has grown, he becomes more curious about who he is and his family….his roots. He wonders why he can’t see his grandfather and why he doesn’t have more family like his friends. It’s hard to answer that question for him right now. There’s no point in ugly details that he’ll learn soon enough growing up a bi-racial child. Our lives today are filled with people who, while aren’t family, love him as if he were because of who he his and the kind of man he will become. I teach him not to talk to strangers, look both ways when crossing the street, never judge a book by its’ cover and that blood bleeds only one color. It’s unfortunate that my dad is missing this experience in his life. Honestly, if he rang tomorrow, I couldn’t forgive him. And not for what he did to me, but because of what he hasn’t done for my son, his grandson. For leaving me with having to answer for his ugly racist views and make excuses for his absence in our lives to a little boy who would have loved him to pieces.

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