Trigger warning: This article mentions child sexual abuse, anti-Black racism, white supremacy and colourism.
I was raised by a white mother who didn’t teach me that I was Black. On the contrary, she seemed to insist that I was white.
I was her oldest child and, like all four of her biological children, I have a Black, Ghanaian father. Yet, unlike my mother’s other children, it seems like I was singled out and made to feel that I was not really Black—that I was designated to relive my mother’s own legacy of trauma—to be the awkward, nerdy, uncoordinated, white one.
I remember being driven home down a country backroad from the psych unit, after experiencing a psychological break in the summer
of 2016.
It was a long and sumptuous drive and a much-needed escape from the oppressive and constraining psych unit. As I took in the green and golden beauty of a late prairie afternoon on the outskirts of Calgary, my soul felt oddly tender. How easy it was to fall for this place.
How bittersweet a moment it was.
My younger sister asked my mom, “Why is Wendy so whitewashed?”—Wendy being my name at the time.
“It’s not her fault!” my mother intoned. “She grew up in a very white place and I should have moved us all to Calgary instead of just doing whatever Grandpa wanted.”
