Who Am I?

From: Maddie

Everyone has an identity. But when you feel like you do not fit here nor there it can be challenging, especially in the mind of a child. Race is not a true concept, but one adapted to highlight differences between people. This being said, kids are not born with the concept of race, it is something acquired over time. The story by Aleichia Williams titled “Too Latina To Be Black, Too Black To Be Latina,” was about a young women of mixed race who moved to a much less diverse area than she grew up in, and didn’t feel like she truly belonged to either race, which led to a lot of confusion. She stated this is the “...first time I could remember being aware of my skin color and the implications it held.” She called this a ‘race crisis.’ This stuck out to me as my niece Nevaeh is also mixed race, white and black. I wanted to highlight the challenges and feelings she may face regarding this throughout her life. She is a beautiful and confident young girl and I never want that to change due to a sense of not belonging. An important point that Williams makes that I would want her to follow as well is that “...just because I don’t fit into one specific mold or the other doesn’t mean I’m any less of who I am.” In my photo, I wanted to capture the confusion, sadness and standards that come from both races and how for someone who is both, they may not know which standards to follow. Since a photo is visual, I decided to focus on the beauty standards of white and black race and highlight the confusion one can feel when having to decide which route to take. To emphasize this, I wanted to “split,” her face in two parts, each side representing part of her race. On the “white side,” I used a paler foundation than her skin tone, changed her eye color to blue and had her hair flatter with a different texture. On the “black side,” I had her normal skin tone, eye color, and hair type in addition to overlining her lips as she feels they’re “small.” I made Nevaeh the sole foreground of the photo with the camera angle straight on and blanked out the background to keep the focus on her. Around her are multiple critiques on appearances from both sides of her race towards the other, comments she may hear one day. Overall, I wanted to capture the critiques and feelings many people face being of mixed race, and I want the message to be to stop pressuring girls and women to fit into a certain beauty standard, as there is not just one, and especially to stop basing it on race.