Growing up I felt like a white woman. I knew my skin was brown but my whole world was surrounded with white people. My parents are British and most of the people went to school with were white. I never thought of myself as having a possible different cultural background. Learning about Bangladesh and actually feeling Bengali were two different things to me. I owned some native clothing and a doll from India, not even Bangladesh.
My style was very much like most American girls. I liked to dress fashionable and getting a great hair cut is still something I very much enjoy. There were so many white actresses I secretly wanted to look like. Seeing Indian women in shows or movies was unheard of for the most part. I remember a teacher telling me I looked like someone from "The Young and the Restless" at one point.
All through high school the only times I felt different were when I auditioned for roles in the school musicals. I knew I would never look the part for an actual speaking role. In fact, I wanted to be an actress all through high school, but once I realized this would be difficult with my look I gave up. By the time I went to college I barely thought about auditioning for a play.
When I moved from a world of everyone knowing I was culturally a white girl, to being one of the only people on my college campus with brown skin, I still felt a part of things. My college was very skilled about making minority students feel accepted. Once in a while people dared to tell me that I probably only got into the college I went to because I was not white. This made me angry and question who I was more, but I wanted to fit in and most of the time I did.
No, I did not start to feel like an actual minority until I graduated college and left the town I went to school. Even though my family is down the road, I am no longer the brown girl who gets to be white. People who do not know me, see me as brown.
I often feel like the small brown person who does not get to have a voice or opinion. The place I feel most alone is the church. I cannot really explain it much beyond a sense that I have. When I went to church in Bangladesh on a mission trip, I felt like a normal person instead of a spectacle. We were singing "Shout to the Lord" and the English speakers sang in English and and the Bengali speakers in their native tongue. As this was happening a young woman lead the entire room in a spontaneous dance. It was like a Bollywood film. All this time I had been the weird girl in the corner dancing alone and never realizing that it was a cultural form of worship God has blessed me with. The lady leading the dance told me Bengali people are blessed in dance. In this church service I felted connected to God and the body of Christ in a way I cannot fully explain. There was freedom and also a sense of place. I understood more about who I had been created to be.
Now I struggle to keep my body still as worship music plays. I never want to offend people, but if I am ever going to be me in a church I dance without thinking about it. It is not a spectacle, but a state of who God made me to be.
There are other times one questions brownness. When years have gone by in a town, and one still feels alone, it is hard not to question if people stay away because I am not white. Most of the time I hope this is not the case, but not being white makes that question always come up. I have other qualities that might turn people away, such as having 5 children. Invitations disappear when one's family size grows. I must say that plenty of white women feel lonely in the small town too.
Overall, being adopted gave me a childhood most darker people in America dream about. Having a very English name helps too. When one leaves the nest the world is different. If one ventures to a town that does not know the family, the gap between white and brown gets larger. Now that my children are mixed race I cannot help but think, they will probably have a childhood and adulthood much like mine. They have a white dad, English names, and the advantages of probably feeling white. When and if they leave, people don't see the half white, they see the Bengali. Most people don't see Bengali, they see dark, not white. I can only hope and pray that their world will accept them and they will get to be who they are freely. People say race is invisible, but from what I can tell color is always color. Denying what is there is not helpful, accepting the other is important. I am not saying that I do not have freedom to exist, just that people will always see me as different. Is it possible for different to ever become equal?
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