12:52pm May 22, 2013

➸ White Father Allegedly Suspected Of Kidnapping Biracial Daughters

weareallmixedup:

youcleverclevergirl:

A Virginia couple was shocked to find a police officer in front of their home when they returned from running errands, but they were even more surprised by the reason for the cop’s visit— to question whether or not they were in fact their children’s parents.

“Well, the customer was concerned because they saw the children with your husband and he didn’t think that they fit,” Keana told the news station. “And I said, ‘What do you mean by they don’t fit?’ And I was trying to get her to say it. And she says, ‘Well, they just don’t match up.’”
Are you effing kidding me? If I, a dark haired, white woman was walking through the store with adorable ginger children, do you think anyone would be concerned they weren’t mine? No, they’d assume they looked like their father, or perhaps I was a babysitter, or even better, mind their own fucking business. It saddens and frustrates me that so many people are still so ignorant in

this area.

Oh, goodness, I cannot even imagine the heartache that something like this would bring to a multiracial family

-Veronica

Appalling. I come from a longterm mixed family, and coincidentally grew up in a part of Virginia where this is not an unusual thing. (Which is part of the reason the rest of the state prefers to pretend we don’t exist, once they had to stop sending out their pet scientific racists to measure our heads.)

I turned out really light compared to most of the rest of the family, including my mom. She looked pretty stereotypically Indian, and I was blonde as a little kid. So, people used to assume that basically any lighter person around must really be my mother: my aunt, some random stranger standing near us, it didn’t matter. Nobody ever went to the point of calling the cops, at least. :/

It’s hard to break down all that’s wrong in this situation. Gotta love Virginia sometimes.

…yeah. The multiracial part of my family happened a long time ago, so I wouldn’t normally call myself multiracial. But I still have the genetics for my skin to go pretty dark for a white person, much like my dad. Even though it can also go very light if I don’t get outside. And combined with some of my facial features, that caused me some serious problems when I was a kid.

The worst was when I was detained coming back from Mexico and they said I wasn’t my (much more light skinned than I was at the time) mother’s child. And that she was trying to smuggle me into the USA. And demanded proof of my citizenship and proof I was her child, neither of which my mother had. I was seven, and (with language comprehension problems that probably didn’t help) too young to understand what was going on at the time, I just remember being bored rather than scared. But it probably terrified my mother. I have no memory of how she managed to convince them to let her take me home.

And being in California, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be read as Mexican-American (or sometimes “part Asian”) growing up, even though I am basically white with some PoC relatives a couple generations back. One of my brothers experienced the same thing. But that one time they thought I wasn’t my mother’s kid, it got actively dangerous.

Notes: