What is wrong with the way the United States understands my body?

How to reconcile the individual with her community? 

I'm alone, on the beach, and two men approach me to ask me where I'm from. They're brown, like me, so I don't mind so much. Except that I've been writing in my journal, things I read over and each time find profound: "do you trust me? I know you don’t understand me, but do you trust me? More than you trust yourself? Who, between me and the world, is the expert on my body?" It's one of those times of writing where I feel the world spinning beneath me, the sky getting wider and my thoughts swelling bigger and bigger until they finally loom larger than this body that never lets me escape. 

I don't feel that I am separate from my body. But the true essence of me, it exists within this body, this vessel I take great pains to take care of. Does the body do things for the brain? Is the body conscious of the way it provides the space and the safety for the brain to send orders? What is the part of me that takes over when neither my brain nor my body can be fully present? 

but sometimes it feels like my body matters more because once people can see it, they won't ever find anything as satisfying

We all know what it means to be a symbol, sometimes. Symbolism and pattern identification, these are the crux of human social existence, at least I think. But sometimes it feels like the load placed on my back, on the back of a body so rife with symbolism, is heavier than others'. I am listening to a podcast featuring Thomas Chatterton Williams, it's called "Can race be transcended?" I can take only a few minutes at a time. 

Not because I don't agree, it's the thoughts I've been screaming in my own head and to anyone outside of me who will listen since 2019. One would think I would feel validated, fulfilled, to hear someone with major media pull expressing the same conceptions of race and identity as me. 

And in a way, I do. In a way, I am thrilled for him and his family and for the 20%-25% black daughter who forced him to reconcile with his limited ideas on racial identity. I am happy for the existence of biracial men finding inspiration in their daughters to question their own binary understandings of white and black. It certainly doesn't reflect the influence I had on my own father, but it makes me happy to think more openings for this sort of fluid understandings of racial identity are appearing, and are being given platforms. 

But sometimes, I think, it hurts quite a bit to hear my own experience as a somewhere between 20%-25% black daughter being articulated by someone else. To think of the immense pressure of symbolism placed on the bodies of those of us who do indeed exist as physical representation of how fallible our racial designation system can be. I know how much other people put words in the mouth of my body before they have any clue what the essence of me might have said, if given the platform. I hear it every day of my life, and although most days it does not bother me, there are a few days a year when it falls upon me and I feel myself become prisoner again to my body, and what it might tell other people about their own thoughts and feelings about race and racial identity. 

I've never disagreed that it is difficult for mixed race people to form an identity. The only thing I ever wanted to talk about was why. To shift the blame from the fact that I dare to exist onto the flaws in a society that so rarely lets me be my full self. 

I grew to ask different questions, to wonder different things. But the things people say to me and ask about me and assume about me, those things hardly change. 

How could I possibly explain what it feels like to be saddled with a body that both has no race at all and yet somehow also is constantly, ceaselessly racialized? How can it be that the body I simply want to live in, experience the world in, can represent an enormous, cloudy concept? How many people in the world would want to take on a body that represents some of the most complicated mixing of the abstract and the concrete that there is? What color is my blood? Is it black, or is it white, or is it brown, or is it red? What split of chromosomes do I have of my white mom's, or of my half-black dad's? When racial mixing gets involved, do I still get half from each parent? Which genes are stronger? Black and white, as races, they are opposites, and opposites fight, even in as micro an environment as my body. Who wins? And why? 

If it were sensical, perhaps one forth of my skin would be brown, little patches on top of white. Or perhaps one of my eyes would be blue, like an Australian shepherd mix, the other one brown. If race made sense in a physical context, if we could predict it, perhaps the melanin in my body would starkly refuse to compromise itself to blending. Perhaps I wouldn't get asked if I was Persian or Mexican or Egyptian or Lebanese or Filipina or Spanish or Italian or Greek, perhaps, finally, I could be recognized as what I am, and there would be no more questions. 

My body does not make sense, I understand. Sometimes even I feel detached from it. Sometimes I wish I could entirely detach myself from it, if only to take a moment to breathe without the world of ethnic ambiguity on my shoulders. 

I'm very tired. But I am alive.