Recording-_5_

The speaker shares their personal history and cultural background. They grew up in Eugene, Oregon, with a mixed heritage of black, white, and Mexican. They felt out of place in the hippie culture of Eugene and missed out on immersing themselves in their own cultures. They also experienced discomfort with their appearance, especially their curly hair, and struggled to fit in with their black family in Portland. They were considered too white to fully belong and faced criticism for not fitting societal expectations, which affected their self-confidence. But first I'm going to cover a bit of my history, because to understand my perspective is to understand where I come from, so let's talk about it. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, I was born and raised there. My parents were never married, my mother was a single mother for a majority of my adolescent years, and I would spend summers and long breaks in Portland with my dad's side, which was my black side of the family. So I am half black, a quarter white, and a quarter Mexican, my mother is Mexican and white. Culturally, I was incredibly out of place growing up in Eugene, Oregon. I can't say the culture there is anything other than hippie, which is not well aligned with the black culture and the Mexican culture, very different, so I feel that I did miss out on really being immersed in culture in my childhood. But my mother would do her best to encourage me. Growing up being a little brown girl with curly hair, I remember I would cry devastated that I had curly hair, all my other white friends had beautiful, straight hair, and I was so ugly, it was heartbreaking now to look back on it, how uncomfortable I was in my own body, I didn't, you know, know any better. And then I would spend summers up in Portland, which is way more diverse, Eugene is a lot more of a black population than Portland, Oregon, and I would be there with my black family, and there I could really fit into a culture, except I did not feel that that culture wanted to include me at all. So the problem with being up there was I was just too white to fully fit in, I got told all the time I talked like a white girl, I got called whitewashed, all kinds of different things, again, really making me uncomfortable in my own body, in my own skin, I didn't know how to be anything other than myself, and truly, getting told that you, there's something wrong with you, it really shuts someone down, it really shuts you down.