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What It’s Like Being a White Girl With a Mixed Mom: Melungeon Chronicles
She was never “white” enough for them. Now, I’m never Native enough for them.
You’re probably thinking I mean black and white mixed, right? What I really mean is tri-racial. That’s right, my mom is three ethnicities and they all balance each other out. She’s like the perfect combo. White, black and Native American. This mix from the Appalachia, where my mom is from, is called Melungeon, and the term is becoming more and more commonplace.
Growing up in South Carolina, my mom was often not white enough for many people, especially those in our small hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist church. To add more hellfire to the mix we were a military family in a small military town. It used to be a quite cow tipping town before the military complex mowed over it.
I don’t know how it is there now, but back in the late 80’s and 90’s people were very resentful of military families. We were often not from the town, locals couldn’t trace our associations or roots by our last names, and we brought in foreign wives from other countries with our little half breed children. Their words, not mine.
My mom would often get remarks with a veiled look of disgust hidden behind “genuine curiosity”,
Are you part Turkish?
Because there was a HUGE Turkish community there dating back to the inception of the military base since the 1950s. This base deploys a lot to another base in Incirlik, Turkey. It’s a small goat town full of Muslim women in full hijab. My family spent time there too.
So, over the course of a couple of decades, men married the local women, brought them back to the deploying base in South Carolina and a Turkish pocket community grew.
What are you? I know you’re part…something.
Troll Antics: Reverse Racism
The irony that I live in today with trolls gaslighting me on social media is that often times I’m not “Native enough” whenever I talk about the Native American culture I grew up with.
My mom was never white enough and now I’m not Native enough.
