It’s time we stopped fetishizing mixed race girls

I love being mixed raced. Mixed girls rule.

It’s the best of both worlds. You have the beautiful caramel skin tone that everyone would die for, the luscious ringlet locks that only mixed raced girls can naturally achieve, the elegant entrancing bone structures and features from each race beautifully melded into one, the different cultures and backgrounds you share and discover and many other extraordinary things.

Along with all these positive aspects of being mixed, there are some negatives, and they’re really quite degrading.

I just can’t help but notice that boys have started fetishising mixed girls. I get named and labelled. “wow you’re so exotic” is one of the phrases that is starting to bug me. No I’m not exotic , I live in a four bedroom house in Essex. I work at Tesco. I study three A levels. In England.

What about me exactly is exotic you might ask? is it my skin colour? is it my physique? my hair? No. Exotic is not a word that should be used to describe a human because, that means that some races are not seen as “exotic” and thats hardly fair is it?

Another stereotype we are given thats beginning to bug me is that mixed raced girls have a reputation for acting “light skinned”. How can a skin colour represent the kind of person that you are? Acting ‘Light skinned’, by this flawed logic, seems to consist of a girl not replying to texts because she thinks she’s too good for everyone, getting lots of male attention, sending nudes around and many other derogatory assumptions. The male version of being ‘light skinned’ is no where near as negative and is in fact representing attractive mixed raced males on social media.

Yes, its understandable that people have their types, but a mixed raced girl is not a type. I’ve had boys tell me that they “love mixed raced girls”. What’s the fault in that you may ask? We aren’t all the same.

There are mixed raced girls that are mixed with two different countries where both of the skin colours are white. Does that not make them white? Or does it still make them mixed raced? People are stereotyping mixed raced people as a mix of White English/American/African. There are all sorts of mixes out there and it’s totally unfair and ignorant to assume.

For many years I used to struggle with knowing who I was, what culture I was meant to fit into and adapt to and whether I was more white or black. People at school would always call me black and that would upset me because i didn’t feel black. I didn’t feel white either, I just felt like myself. I straightened my hair everyday for years because i didn’t want to deal with the stupid petty comments people would say about it. But now suddenly everyone is adoring my hair type? I just can’t win.

I also hate that people assume that mixed raced girls have the perfect body type. Everyone’s body is different no matter what race you are. It’s so much pressure to live up to people’s expectations of a mixed raced girl. I think the body assumption has come from the media. Many male rappers such as Chris brown, T.I , Drake and others rarely feature girls that aren’t mixed raced. But it’s not representative – the girls they feature are a very specific trope, extremely attractive and usually half naked with big breasts and a lot of junk in the trunk. No wonder people think we all look that way.

Being mixed is great. Don’t get me wrong. I just wish people would be a bit less ignorant about it and be a bit more open minded about the fact that I am from two different backgrounds and that is all. I’m not a sex object , not a ‘lighty’ and certainly not the girls we see being degraded on TV everyday.