Samiir Bolsten Finding Blackness
“When black people marry outside of the race, it waters us down, it is destroying our race,” my friend’s mother claimed while stopped at a red light. Her head slightly turned so that my girlfriend and I could hear her in the backseat. My friend’s mother, a black woman in her late thirties, was driving my black girlfriend and me home. Accelerating again as the light turned green, she continued, “That’s why it feels so good to see a young black couple. We start marrying their men and they start taking ours. It’s ruining our race.” At this point I had to make this woman aware that I was not comfortable with her sentiments, considering the fact that my mother is white.
“Actually, ma’am, I am the product of an interracial relationship and marriage,” I started to say, as the car was coming to a halt in the parking space outside the train station. “I’m half white.” I saw the disbelief on her face as she turned to look at me.
“No,” the woman said, clearly startled. She looked me up and down as if to understand how she could have overlooked something that should be so obvious. Her problem was that my white heritage is hard to spot at first glance, as I have a relatively dark complexion for a mulatto. At a loss for words, she continued to study me before stumbling over three or four apologies. As I sat in the back of the car listening to her incomplete sentences and halting attempts to backpedal, I could only reflect on the fact that I was in familiar territory.
I was used to dealing with awkward and offensive situations related to race, having grown up with my dark complexion in predominantly white Denmark. Later on, as my family moved to more diverse environments, perceptions of me changed—both in my own eyes and in the eyes of others. It seemed that because of my unusual family situation and racial makeup, I was always perceived as different from the norm, no matter where we relocated. Although this led to issues of low self-worth and some turbulent times mentally, I eventually became comfortable with always being different. Much of this comfort came from realizing that norms were by no means rules, and that all people had some way in which they were different.
A stereotype or norm can never define a person completely, and every identity has a story behind it. Regardless of how much one adheres to social norms, the emotions and struggles we carry inside create a unique human. I eventually saw my struggle to fit the norm as a chance to understand the world better, as well as myself. My unique background forced me to realize that norms did not apply to me, and I eventually used this realization to gain a deeper understanding of myself beyond the pressures of stereotypes. This required me to begin viewing myself and others outside of the racial scope in order to get a deeper appreciation for individual identities. Because discounting race contradicted how it first shaped my identity in every way, the road to self-understanding was long and arduous.
My mother was born and raised in a middle-class family in Ballerup, Denmark, a town of about forty thousand with a very small colored population. Because of her strict upbringing, she focused on working and moved out on her own as early as she could. High school was my mother’s highest level of education. During her late teens, she went on vacation with her mother and sister to Morocco. My father, who is only one year older than my mother, was selling souvenirs to tourists in Casablanca. He spent his days standing on a street corner, selling cheap ceramics and pickpocketing tourists who appeared rich. From what I understand, this is where he met my mother.
Given the bits and pieces of the story that I have picked up from my mother and father throughout the years, it appears that their interactions were nothing more than a teenage love affair. To this day I am unsure how they communicated, because my father’s English is very poor and I know my mother never spoke Arabic. Regardless of how they communicated, my father gave my mother a souvenir she was not expecting: my older sister, Farrah. I am not sure exactly what happened over the next few months, but I know that my father moved to Denmark and eventually wed my mother. The circumstances under which my parents met did not exactly provide a stable foundation for a relationship or marriage.
My father had a rough upbringing in Morocco as the youngest of seven children. Being the youngest left him essentially forgotten by his parents, and he seldom had his needs met. At times he did not even own a pair of shoes. My father was rather uneducated, which may have contributed to the poor quality of his life. By the time he was twenty, he had completed the Danish equivalent of middle school with a passing grade in all his subjects.
When my father immigrated to Denmark in his late teens, he had problems finding work and turned to a life of crime and drugs. During a psychotic episode brought on by drugs, my father caused a ruckus in a nightclub by wielding a large kitchen knife. I never fully understood how this story ended, aside from the fact that he was apprehended, deemed mentally unstable, and sent to a mental health institution rather than a regular prison. Because of this, for a period in my childhood I barely saw my father, who was virtually the only black male influence in my life at the time.
I was born on February 10, 1986, in Ballerup. It ultimately turned out that my mother and father were not meant for each other, and they divorced less than a year after I was born. My father still lived in the same town, but he did not provide much support for my mother, who was now alone and raising two black children in a predominantly white town. She once told me that people would approach her to compliment her beautiful children, assuming she had done a good deed and adopted them from a Third World country. My mother has vividly described on several occasions how these people’s facial expressions changed from admiration to disgust once they found out she had given birth to these two dark children. As my mother described it, their view of her instantly changed from a noble humanitarian to “someone who fucked a nigger.” Before I was even able to comprehend the issue of race, my mother had suffered on my behalf, being judged and labeled by others.
Although I was a Danish citizen born in Denmark, and spoke only Danish, my skin color caused people to classify me as an immigrant, or at the very least to associate me with the resentment they had toward immigrants. When looking at me, they instantly felt they were looking at a product of parents from some war-ridden nation who came to Denmark to leech off the state. When they saw me, they assumed that my ignorant immigrant parents were raising me according to their ignorant immigrant culture, which would certainly be detrimental to what Denmark stood for. The xenophobic nature of many Danes reminded me constantly of my skin color, and therefore my inherently subordinate status.
During most of my childhood we were lower middle class, living in an apartment with my mother’s boyfriend Jakob (who was white), my mother, my sister, and my half sister (who is also white). Growing up, I seldom had someone to teach me the things that most people learn from their parents, particularly boys: how to treat women, how to drive, and so on. Jakob played the biggest role in raising me, for which I am incredibly thankful. Yet even Jakob’s unconditional love could not teach me what it meant to be a black man, particularly in a town like Ballerup and a country like Denmark. I was completely on my own in trying to figure out what my complexion would mean for my life.
Although we always had food, my mother and Jakob struggled financially, perpetually living paycheck to paycheck below the poverty line while trying to raise three children. My family’s financial hardships, coupled with the fact that my skin color was so different from the other children’s, made me uncomfortable and self-conscious in school. Most of my friends had parents who were married, educated, had stable jobs, and were significantly older than mine. My school luckily provided free lunch, which hid my family’s status on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Unfortunately, the cafeteria workers went on strike when I was in second grade, and all the students were required to bring their own lunch to school for the year. My lunches, consisting of butter and cheese sandwiches on white bread and orange juice poured into a jar, were rather embarrassing next to my peers’ purchased meals of chicken subs and hamburgers, which their parents dropped off for them.
I also dreaded field days, as they were typically ski trips. While my friends were downhill skiing with their brand-new ski equipment or snowboards, I had to cross-country ski using Jakob’s old equipment from the 1970s. Sometimes my family situation even affected my schoolwork, such as when we were supposed to do a report on our parents’ profession, I had nothing to report on. Even when I began playing soccer, getting dropped off on the back of a bike rather than being driven to practice in a car highlighted the difference between my peers and me. And then, of course, the constant exclamation point: I was “The Black Kid.”
As my biological father turned to a life of crime and drugs, his relationship with my sister and me deteriorated steadily. During the early years of my life, my sister Farrah and I would spend a night at his apartment every two weeks. We used to play soccer, cook, watch movies, and sit around while he smoked cigarettes and spoke in Arabic with his friends. At this point I was still too young to realize all the ways in which my father was not fulfilling his paternal duties to my sister and me, and to my mother. The most significant thing I remember him teaching me was how to deliver a headbutt properly—snatching a man forward by his collar and meeting his momentum with a forehead crashing into the bridge of his nose. My father’s role as my sole (yet almost nonexistent) black male influence caused me to associate such behavior with what I perceived to be black masculinity.
My relationship with my father and other colored people gave me no model for what my identity and demeanor should be as a black person. All I knew was that my identity could not possibly be like that of my peers because there was always something reminding me that I was different and inferior. I faced ridicule in school and on my soccer team, and fought often. Hearing “Nigger!” shouted at me was no rarity, and it came from children both my age and older. Sometimes it made me sad, sometimes angry. Regardless of my external reaction, internally the word affected me the same every time, as it was part of a system of checks and balances that ensured “niggers” would be kept in their place at the bottom of the totem pole. I had no way to find anything positive about being black, nor anyone or anything to identify with. Instead, I spent the first eight or nine years of my life loathing my skin color and the things that came with it. I remember being in music class in the second grade and looking at my friend’s hair, wishing mine were straight like his; dreading soccer practice because my shorts exposed the dry skin on my legs. The other kids did not have to worry about ashy legs because it wasn’t visible on their white skin. Ashy skin is of course normally visible on black children, which is why black parents know to moisturize it properly. Unfortunately, because I was the only black child and my mother was white, it only highlighted the differences between my peers and me.
Feeling like an outcast, I spent a great deal of time by myself. I enjoyed activities that allowed me to express my creative side: sports, music, and art. During very early childhood, I often occupied myself by building (not playing) with Legos, drawing, and engaging in just about any form of art that allowed me to express myself. Because I typically excelled at these activities, I felt the most comfortable while involved in them, and in school they gained me social acceptance. Ultimately, however, I was still uncomfortable being black because I found no advantage in being outside the norm.
Then The Fresh Prince came.
In 1990 Will Smith was offered the chance to star in his own television sitcom, titled The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The show became a huge success in the United States and went on to be broadcast in several nations across the world, one of them being Denmark. Will “Fresh Prince” Smith became one of the first positive images of a black male I had, and I instantly felt like I should and could relate to his character. I changed my behavior and acted more like the character I saw on the television screen; I could identify with him. Smith’s character grew up in inner-city Philadelphia and was uprooted to live with his rich uncle in Bel-Air. Seeing him adapt to his new environment by taking advantage of his status as an outsider intrigued me and inspired me to wonder if I could do the same. Essentially, Smith was creating something positive out of being the one who always stuck out. I concluded that the natural way for me to do the same was to act like he did. I found comfort in being a class clown, using my outsider status as a way to control people’s attention rather than to catch their attention unwillingly with my dark complexion or curly hair.
Once I realized that the Fresh Prince was not just a cool person on TV but also a rapper, I instantly took an interest in his music and its genre: rap/hip-hop. I thought rapping was cool mainly because the Fresh Prince did it, and I idolized him mainly because of the show. Rap music remained a loose interest of mine, as it was hard to access in Denmark. So I had to be satisfied with watching shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I watched The Fresh Prince and other American shows so much that I learned to speak English fluently, and I began gaining a deeper interest in music as I started to understand more of the lyrics.
Then 2Pac came.
In February 1996 a Los Angeles–based rapper, 2Pac (also known as Tupac Shakur), released rap music’s first-ever double disc, titled All Eyez on Me. Because of the album’s incredible success, 2Pac’s fame extended far beyond U.S. borders and made its way to my television and radio in Denmark. Tupac Shakur was another of my first major influences as a black male. His swagger, vivid storytelling, and emotional delivery completely pulled me into the medium that he expressed himself through: hip-hop.
After being heavily intrigued and amazed by rap music, I decided that I wanted to create my own, as it seemed like something I could excel at and use to express myself. Because I found the most comfort in the activities I was praised most highly for, I felt that doing them allowed me to be less inhibited as a black person. I felt that my skin color rendered me so insignificant that there was no reason for me to be around others unless I was doing something worth watching. Rapping appeared to be the coolest thing to do because I had seen those I identified with racially doing it well. I thought I could do well at it too, which would allow me both to express myself fully and to gain social acceptance. Putting my thoughts down on paper allowed me to escape daily reality as a subordinate member of society, and to transform it into a reality in which I held power through my words. I wrote about everything, from my actual life and things I went through to fabricated stories about people in the United States. I enjoyed transcribing my imagination into rap. As I began jotting down my thoughts, feelings, random stories, and even just things that rhymed in cool ways, something was also changing in the social fabric of my peers: being black was becoming cool.
Because gangsta rap, now with 2Pac at the forefront, so heavily influenced popular culture, everything represented and described in this music had become the latest fad to follow for millions of people worldwide who could not relate in the least to being black. The result was that in about 1996, the youth of my hometown, Ballerup, deemed acting like 2Pac the coolest possible behavior: people were imitating the hand signs he was flashing, reciting his lyrics without knowing the true context (or at times even the translation), and trying to dress like they were gangsta rap artists. Everything surrounding the gangsta rap culture became the latest fad. For me, this mainly meant that I could now be comfortable being black. Between 1996 and 1998 I found ways to be a little more comfortable in my skin. I benefited from the social acceptance that popular culture icons whose color matched mine had gained among youth trying to rebel against their parents.
The character traits of the “cool” black people, however, were less than admirable, and my peers began to associate blackness with all these negative qualities. While I was simply looking for a way to feel comfortable by having a point of relation in social situations, I had instead subscribed to perpetuating negative stereotypes by equating the characteristics portrayed in gangsta rap with blackness. Immature and ignorant of the implications, I took comfort in the current trend in my middle school that was pushing me right to the top of the social hierarchy.
The question of whether I was “authentically” black never actually occurred to me because I had no basis for comparison. Because my skin color had caused me so much turmoil and ridicule in my younger years, I clung to the notion that I was black, since it was the only identity I had comfortably adopted. As hip-hop and various other mediums of popular culture set the trends for what was cool and socially coveted, I related many of the hyperbolic images of black masculinity to aspects of my own personality, believing I had found my pathway to fail-safe social acceptance. This type of comfort grew to the point where my personality began to develop into a loud and outrageous character. I sagged, gestured, rapped, and code-switched my way into feeling comfortable in an identity that I saw as a social safety net. Ballerup, Denmark, did not have enough black people for me to understand that what I associated with blackness was not a universal reality. I would eventually realize that even in a community filled with black people, I was outside the norm because of my unique situation growing up.
The turning point of my life came at age twelve, when I was uprooted and had to leave everything I had ever known in Ballerup to move to the United States. My mother had broken up with her boyfriend Jakob two years earlier and now had a fiancé named Enzo. Enzo was a white man of Italian heritage who had grown up in the United States, and my mother decided to follow him overseas to start a new life. Over the next few years our family did quite a bit of moving between different places Enzo had lived before—Philadelphia, Orlando, and then back to Denmark. While these moves taught me to interact with people of all races, it also taught me that I deviated from the norm no matter what type of community I was in. After moving around for a few years, I finally decided that I wanted to move back to Philadelphia to finish high school.
When I was sixteen, I moved in with Enzo’s ex-wife, Leslie. Leslie also lived with some of her children by Enzo, who were now my stepsiblings. The house was both crowded and cluttered, a chaotic environment. The three bedrooms and living room were inhabited by as many as nine people, depending on the day and time of year. We also had two flea-infested dogs and an old cat named Missy. For a period of time we also had a friend of the family sleeping in my brother’s broken-down Ford Taurus out in front of the house.
Usually someone would be up and using the living room until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., so I simply had to adapt to noise at all hours of the night. My brothers often had friends coming over very late, and they went in and out of the house to smoke blunts, get drunk, and carry on in the living room. This environment made it very hard to focus on academics and to get a decent night’s sleep. My main goals when I moved back to the United States, however, were to earn good grades and finish high school, so I always found a way to get my homework and studying done, even if it meant doing so in a distracting environment. Although I was getting high constantly with one of my stepbrothers, my rule was that I never got high during the week unless I had finished all of my schoolwork. Therefore, the first thing I did when I got home from school was to sit down at the kitchen table and do my homework.
My time back in Philadelphia was also the first time I ever faced challenges to my blackness because of my complexion. As a child, I was always the darkest person around (except for my father), leaving me subject to a variety of jokes regarding how dark I was, how hard I would be to find at night, and so on. In Philadelphia, though, there was a large colored population with a wide range of complexions. During that time I first experienced someone referring to me as “light-skinned.” Although I resembled a Negro phenotype, I felt that this comment somehow detracted from the black image I had fabricated and held so dear for most of my life. I had always clung to the notion that I was black, visibly black. If some perceived me as light-skinned, how would that affect my already shaky blackness? Furthermore, because I had grown out my hair during the first few months back in Philadelphia, my status as “other” rather than black in the eyes of others grew. At this point my lack of fashionable apparel, strange demeanor, curly hair, and different vernacular all contributed to what I perceived as the failing of my blackness.
Once again I found myself differing from the norm. The perception of black masculinity I had drawn from my father, The Fresh Prince, and 2Pac years earlier seemed obsolete, and I was unable to locate a persona to strive for. Rather than seeing one way a black male should act, I realized that different norms applied to different people. While I wanted to be seen as black in the eyes of my peers, I still did not drastically change my demeanor to fit the norm. I ultimately realized that I would rather be true to myself and strive for my own goals: attending college and succeeding in life. The stereotypical black males at school called me a nerd because I spoke differently and spent class time participating and working.
Living in an area where the complexion and demeanor of the colored population was quite broad allowed me to concern myself less with my complexion. Rather than worrying about looking different, I began to realize that I always stood out in some way, owing to my upbringing. I could relate to many of the people who fit the norm in terms of skin color, but aside from this superficial characteristic, our commonalities varied. Everyone had a different way of dealing with being black in modern society. When color started having less significance in my mind, I was able to concern myself with getting to know myself as a person rather than as “a black person.” Although I still wanted to be accepted by my peers and to earn the title of “being black,” as I grew I became more concerned with learning about myself as a man than with being among the in-crowd. I felt I was repairing my identity to compensate for the damage caused by all the confusion in my early years. Part of this reparation involved reassessing my relationships with my early black influences and understanding more about their identities. The very first of these influences was my father, and I felt a need to get a deeper understanding of what had shaped the outcome of his life and identity.
Once I finished high school and started college, my father and I did not maintain steady contact. I never really spoke to him over the phone, and he did not have a computer, so we couldn’t communicate through email. During my junior year, however, my father sent me a letter. I opened it and immediately was filled with a sense of nostalgia for my childhood. Every birthday and Christmas card had been scribbled in the exact same way—over two entire pages. The penmanship was visibly that of someone unused to writing, which made sense, considering my father’s middle school education. It appeared that he had spent extra time formalizing the letter, skipping every other line to simulate the double spacing in a computer document. Through run-on sentences and poor Danish, I sensed a father’s genuine attempt to connect with his son.
About halfway down the first page, he truly tried to reach out to me:
Samiir it’s the first time I write to you we have never SpokeN with Eachother as father and son but I think you have dun very WEll I am ProUd over you but one thing I want to say that you should foCus on your sTudies so you can get yourself a good eDucation hope you don’t dislike or afTer all these years I should come and decide over you Samiir I write these lines because I want us to start keeping contact by telefone to begin me or that you come n live with me a few days when you come To Denmark we have to start spending time or more specifiCally speak to eachother once a month per Telefone.
While I was reading the letter, tears started streaming down my face. I felt a sense of happiness and pride that my father had reached out in an attempt to connect with me. I saw my father’s vulnerability in this letter and began realizing that he did not have all the answers. This was not a man who had been guiding me through black masculinity as a child; this was a man who himself was young when his life had been turned upside down with the sudden responsibility for a life other than his own; a man who in his teens had left everything he had ever known to go live in a foreign country where he was in the minority. His life and identity as a black man had been shaped by confusion and instability, so for me to base my early identity on his example was illogical. At this point I wanted to see my father as badly as he wished to see me. I wanted to look deeper into his personality and life in order to understand myself better.
The next time I went to Denmark, I lived with my father for most of the time. During this visit I got to spend time with him and see his daily routine of drugs and alcohol. On one occasion I sat down and joined in these activities. It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was sitting around the apartment lounging in my robe. One of my father’s friends, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, came by with a bottle of liquor and immediately began drinking. After about ten minutes, both he and my father snorted a line of amphetamine off the table. Although on some level I felt hurt that my father was living this lifestyle, I also felt a certain sense of connection and pride that our relationship had grown to the point where he would allow me to see this side of him. I poured myself a drink from his friend’s bottle of liquor and took a sip. As painful as it was to see his destructive lifestyle, I realized that I could have been in the same position if a couple of circumstances had been different in my life. As we became more and more inebriated, I became increasingly comfortable with seeing and connecting with this side of my father. After about an hour, I joined them as they smoked some hash.
It was three in the afternoon and I was already quite intoxicated. I sat back on the couch, feeling the liquor in my system while listening to my father and his friend converse. Peering through a cloud of hash smoke, I wondered what the two could possibly be speaking about that was of any importance. These were two individuals divided not only by generation but also by race. Were drugs such a point of connection that two individuals from such different walks of life could use them to connect with each other? After pondering this for a few minutes, I realized there must be some sense of kinship around these substances, considering that I was just now connecting with my father at age twenty-one because of them. I felt as if I had been inducted into a fraternity of substance use, sitting there drunk in a hazy room, watching two people of different backgrounds do lines of amphetamine. While it was a strange thing to see, I still felt a sense of resolution in finally being a part of the type of life my father had chosen for so many years over connecting with his family.
I had succeeded in viewing my father just as a person, rather than as the figure who was supposed to teach me how to be black. I was trying to disprove the notion that being black trapped me in a set behavior or thought pattern. This would help me contextualize myself and gain comfort in straying from the norm instead of being depressed by it. I wanted to see myself as black, but I was slowly learning to accept that there was not just one behavioral pattern I had to adhere to. The range of complexions, experiences, and demeanors of black people was vast, and not everyone would stand under the same umbrella. I strove to view people as humans, rather than determining what race they belonged to. The complicated part came when people dictated their behavior on the basis of race and racial stereotypes.
When I first arrived at Dartmouth College, a prestigious liberal arts college in rural New Hampshire, I did not really know what to expect. During the course of my life, I had encountered several different types of black people: people who seemed to subscribe to the stereotypes portrayed on television, and people who were black but had nothing to do with the stereotypes on television. I wondered what types of people I would encounter at Dartmouth.
What I found in college was that not many people shared the “black” experience in terms of what it stereotypically implies: lower socioeconomic status, an urban environment, and so on. If the aforementioned implied anything about blackness, then I found that I, in fact, would seem to be one of the blackest people at the school. I did not fully subscribe to the stereotypical behavior that accompanies such experiences, because I was growing accustomed to concerning myself with my natural inclinations rather than adhering to how people expected me to act. Much as I had determined in high school, there were certain types of behaviors that signified “blackness.” It was my assumption, however, that those who subscribed to these behaviors did so because of their life experiences. My assumption turned out to be incredibly wrong; it seemed that many of the black people at Dartmouth who acted “black” appeared to do so in order to legitimize their blackness. Many of them used inner-city slang, wore urban attire, and generally had an inner-city demeanor. My impression was that these people were trying to establish a new identity while at college—one they hadn’t had access to in high school. Perhaps they had been like me, considered nerds because they weren’t black enough, and were now trying to escape that label. The difference between them and me, however, was that I had actually lived many of the experiences that created these signifiers of an authentic black experience. I simply chose not to act them out because I was finding comfort in straying from the norm and focusing more on myself.
Because of the way I perceived many of the black people at my college, I continued to be somewhat of a loner. I had friends, but I did not let too many people get close to me. We were at a privileged school like Dartmouth, so why would they want to hear about the drug charges my brother back home was facing, my father’s drug problem, or my family’s money problems? I did not disclose much information about these things because I figured people would place me in the same box with many of the other black people at Dartmouth, assuming I was disclosing these things only to legitimize some form of blackness related to the struggles commonly faced in urban environments.
I found that those I got along with best were those who did not concern themselves too much with how they were perceived by others, but rather were true to themselves and simply focused on enjoying college and getting an education. My diverse life experience had finally made me as close to color-blind as one can be, and I selected my friends entirely because of their demeanor, and in no way for their skin color or social class. As I grew more comfortable at Dartmouth, I began to understand the value of my life experience more fully. All of the places I had lived and all my struggles had made me a person who could relate to and communicate with almost anyone, no matter where a person was from.
Just as blacks had been portrayed in their first cinematic representation in Birth of a Nation as lazy, good-for-nothing slackers, many blacks at Dartmouth would try to embody this stereotype in an effort to claim their blackness. Rather than bragging about who had the best grades or who performed best under pressure, many conversations would lead to a competition over who could convince the other that he was a worse student—whether these claims were true or not. Realizing this, I became comfortable with what I was and whom I had become for one of the first times in my life. Not only had my unique and incredibly diverse life experience helped me adapt to college and gain acceptance from my peers and interest from my professors, but also it embodied the struggles that so many black students for some reason wished they had experienced, which gave me further legitimization in the eyes of those who actually gauged this as something important.
While I was thankful I had endured the circumstances I had, I would never want to do that again. When I was embarrassed because my family did not have as much money as others or when I had to see family members deal with substance abuse, the last thing I thought about was how it might legitimize me at a later point; all I wanted was to overcome it. Once I finally made something out of myself and matriculated at an Ivy League school, my previous struggles and failures became marks of pride as opposed to points of shame.
I have been called “nigger,” been on the receiving end of racial jokes, and struggled with my own self-worth solely because of my skin color. Regardless of how strange I seem to my peers and how little I fall within the scope of stereotypical blackness, my life and identity have been dramatically influenced by my complexion. How could anyone tell me that I am not black? Limiting blackness to a number of stereotypes and negative behaviors is ignorant and disrespectful to the race as a whole. So while I consider myself black (well, half black), I will never again allow this label to dictate the way I interact with others or present myself to the outside world. At times it will change how I am perceived and treated, but as a man who has endured this label my entire life, I shall not let myself be affected. Through the same actions, thoughts, and expressions that make me so hard to define, I will continue to prove to those around me that it is best to define me by my character and not my complexion.
Upon graduating from Dartmouth College, Samiir accepted a position as a marketing strategist with a leading agency. After arriving at what he considers a place of peace and stability, Samiir has started the long process of getting his father clean from substance abuse.