Community Post: Andre E.

We love hearing from the Mixed Nation Community, so when we received Andre’s amazingly powerful story of struggle, adversity and love, we just had to share it! Please enjoy:

Hello, first of all I would like to tell you how excited my wife and I were to find a website dedicated to mixed people! We are both biracial (black & white 50/50 aka Mulatto), so our kids are even more blended than we are. We’ve noticed that this site does a lot of celebrating mixed kids, and interracial couples, which is great…but  I just wanted to reflect on the actual struggle of what the older generations had to endure to make it possible for all of us to become a Mixed Nation. The mixed kids that get posted are nice looking and the beautiful products of interracial relationships, however some parents are not mixed and did not spend a lifetime living as a mixed person in America and it’d be nice to see more multigenerational mixed families represented.

Some people might not have an idea of what it feels like to be shunned by your family because you are half black. That was the case with my wife, Keisha. Her mother would lie to strangers about Keisha’s ethnicity out of fear of being beaten for being an n(word)-lover. Her parents were married in the good ole South, when being an interracial couple was not accepted like it is today. My parents also had to worry about the KKK showing up at their wedding. My parents just so happen to be the 2nd interracial couple to be married in the state of Virginia after the Supreme Court case involving the Lovings family “Right to Marriage Equality” in 1968. I feel people who are mixed or interracial should be recognized for their struggle. Attached is a photo of my family, and our parents that helped make this a truly Mixed Nation.

~Andre E.