AIBU to resent having mixed cultural backgrounds?

[TannyFickler]

I’m well into adulthood, and I resent having parents from two different countries/cultures. I never feel like I belong anywhere and I was very aware of this even as a child. Anyone else feel similarly? For reference, one parent is from the UK, I had some minor racism aimed at me in primary and secondary school but barely anything.

@TannyFickler it's so sad you feel this way about your mixed heritage. I agree you might want to unpack this further with the support of a therapist however reading your responses and OP I'd suggest your "problem" isn't being mixed race it's having parents who weren't able to equip you for the world the conceived you into.

You mention cultural clashes and the like. That sounds hard and sad. I say this as a fully black woman raised in the U.K. to Nigerian parents who's married to a 🇮🇳🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 DH and raising mixed ethnicity and culture DC... School may be difficult with bullying, racism, micro aggressions but home should be your santuary. It's a shame yours wasn't.

My parents are both from the same country but I'm from England. It's difficult because when I go to their country they see me as 100% English but growing up here I was seen as 100% their country by friends and others around me. So I don't feel like anyone claims me as theirs haha

Agree with others that it’s so interesting to hear about other people’s experiences of this weird feeling of “otherness”.
It’s very apparent that lots of us have had unpleasant experiences, but has anyone had a surprisingly satisfying or joyful experience as a direct result of their mixed heritage?
When I was about 17, my mum and I were in town during the busy Christmas shopping period. The town I grew up in has a huge community from my mum’s home country. We were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and decided on a little pub that was under new management - turns out the new management were from my mums country. I went to the bar to order our drinks (in my typically East Anglian accent), and was met with “We don’t like English drinking in here” I immediately switched to my mum’s native language and told him that we didn’t want to give our money to a business that would exclude people based on their nationality and his jaw nearly hit the floor

OP I really hope you can begin to embrace both cultures. I am so sorry you feel this way :(

I am half Turkish and half Indian and I’m lucky that my parents did a pretty good job at balancing my two ethnicities. I think that’s partly because they fully embraced each other’s backgrounds (enjoyed each cultures food, celebrated each others traditions etc). They never tried to change each other and I really admire that.

I have a son who is EVEN more mixed than me and i hope me and my DP can give him the same upbringing I had so he can be proud of all 3 cultures.

Although I am aware I don’t technically ‘fit in’ to either culture (and I get looks when I’m in both countries) I completely embrace and celebrate both sides because it makes me unique and so what if I’m not fully one or the other? I have something so much better!

I look rather ambiguous and I love that no one can place me, I could be from anywhere and I prefer it that way. Sure I’ve been called the P word and ‘half caste’ but I’d rather be different than fit into a box.

I hope one day you can enjoy and celebrate your backgrounds and be proud, you don’t need to fit in anywhere - you are uniquely you!

Also I think growing up in London helped too because almost all of my friends were from diverse mixed backgrounds and we actively celebrated our differences

I’ve been out all day but

‘ ‘Eastern European’ and ‘SE Asian’ are not generalising an entire continent, but specifying specific parts with similar cultural characteristics.’

No. Eastern Europe has a range of people. An Albanian Muslim for example practicing arranged marriage isn’t going to identify as culturally similar to a Polish Catholic. A Muslim Tartar from Ukraine, a ethnic group living in Russia and a white Protestant from central Eastern Europe would also be bemused. It’s a diverse place with many religions, cultures and peoples who do not look similar. Asian tribes, Northern Europeans, Turks and Celts among others have been moving and settling there since before Christianity was born.

I can appreciate Africa’s diversity of culture, because I grew up with various cultures in a state and geographical area. It’s quite normal to understand. I learn about African Kingdoms and the pastoral Sahara in my school curriculum and learned to appreciate the wonders of the continent, not having been exposed to the more narrow British centric history I now see my kids studying.

@GreenFlipFlop

I'm black but grew up in the UK from the age of 6 and have constantly battled trying to fit in with white friends and prove that although I look different, I'm not different by doing all the things they did, but also navigating African parents and the culture at home (not allowed to sleepovers, strict education etc) thankfully my parents were less strict than other African parents so I had a bit off leeway, but as I've gotten older I definitely consider myself more easily able to relate more to white British culture than black African culture which makes me slightly sad as sometimes I feel I casted off my heritage in a desperate attempt to fit in and it's something I've only realised in the last couple of years. I have a mixed race son and I worry about this for him as my side of the family are very African and lively and the other side are traditional white British. I'd never want him to feel like he needs to pick a side.

@GreenFlipFlop he doesn’t have to pick a side if you, and his extended family, embrace the differences and similarities on both sides. I’m of African heritage, born here. I also had to navigate the whole British versus African culture growing up here with a first-generation immigrant mother, but I’ve always felt myself to be both African (by descent) and English (by birth). I married a white English man, and honestly, it was a fantastic joining of our two cultures, cemented more so when we had our kids. Culturally, they lean slightly more towards the ‘black side’, but have found their places in society with ease, as we always taught them that they had a right to take up whatever space they felt comfortable in.

Feelng like you don't belong is very common. My parents were both from the same European country but I was born and grew up here. I never felt one thing or the other and felt like I was different and didn't fit in wherever ever I was .

When I was in my 20s in the 1980s I took part in an international conference organised by a local cultural organisation for the children of immigrants and almost every single one of us said the same thing about struggling with a sense if who we were and where we fit.

I think this feeling can be exacerbated if there is tension or secrecy around

@Hadjab That's positive to hear, I hope we can do the same! I'm really hoping my DS never feels conflicted so we're both trying our best to raise him to understand that he's both African and British and like you say, belongs in each space!

I don't know if I'm being naive here, but I feel as if my mixed-culture kids did very well for themselves. They always seemed to have a wide circle of friends from diverse backgrounds, and knew how to make themselves comfortable with all kinds of people. I feel as if the fact that they were born into two worlds and can't just retreat into one may make them homeless in a way, but that in another way, made them citizens of the wider world. I don't know if my son would have been able to connect to his delightful fiancee, the daughter of immigrants, another kind of hybrid, if he wasn't his own kind of culturally-mixed being.

It's complex. Spectrum of people some who are completely comfortable. Those the other end of the spectrum who have never found where they fit in. Why? What can be done to solve this?

Thank you for this thread. It s very interesting and educational to me, whose white British heritage is the only thing I'm sure of.
A couple of years ago I watched a documentary about a British fascist who had a white Mother and African Indian father. He said that because of his experiences he did not believe that different races and cultures could or should live together and this was the basis of his racist views. I remember being shocked but if you feel disenfranchised from both cultures I suppose a developing aggression towards one of them isn't as difficult to understand.

@PrincessNutella This actually kind of describes me too. There are many positives to being mixed culture or growing up in multiple countries. On the whole I feel it's been enriching, but there are also downsides. I tended to focus on those in my reply to the OP which I suppose didn't give the full picture.
I'm married here now and my daughter is growing up with 2 cultures. But I've made a conscious decision that we'll bring her up with Scottish as her main culture, and mine as the secondary/complementary culture. It makes sense because she was born here and will go to school here. We're also not going to move around during her childhood if we can help it. She will get opportunities to travel and to be exposed to different cultures and to spend time in my country, but she'll have a home here which will be a constant.
IME it's the lack of consistency and an absence of a dominant culture that you can identify with that causes problems. I've seen it with many people.

@Oblomov21

It's complex. Spectrum of people some who are completely comfortable. Those the other end of the spectrum who have never found where they fit in. Why? What can be done to solve this?

People and families are complex. It's not necessarily 'solvable.' Some people will have grown up in a monoculture and have issues they have not come to terms with. Human condition I suppose.

What a great thread, thanks for starting it @TannyFickler. So many people have perfectly encapsulated my own feelings! As a visibly mixed race Brit, I was raised in an almost entirely white British environment as my mother didn't want us to feel different. So no language and very little cultural influence from our Indian side. However, we were lucky enough to visit family in India regularly (but of course didn't fit in there either as we were too British and couldn't speak the language). As an adult I have lived overseas most of my life, married a man from a third country (on reflection in a bid to attach myself to someone worth a strong sense of identity) and we moved to the UK 5 years ago. In a nutshell, it has been hard, I still don't feel like I belong and in fact we are intending to relocate abroad again to another third country. Somehow, we both find that living elsewhere, in a place where we don't expect to belong is actually easier.
I'm not sure there is a 'solution', as someone else said earlier, for those of us who feel so untethered but it's comforting to know I'm not alone in these feelings.

I’m also mixed British/Eastern European. My siblings and I grew up in this country, though my DB wasn’t born here and only recently adopted British citizenship.

I have mixed feelings about my Eastern European heritage. Partly because I experienced xenophobia at school because of my surname. My F was suspected of being a Russian spy (this was during the Cold War) because of his foreign accent and appearance. But also because my F sexually abused my DSis and me.

Not many people who know me now are aware of my heritage, as my DH is British and I now have his surname, as do our DDs. (I can see that this isn’t particularly healthy but it’s easier for me that way.)

However, I have done my best to stay in touch with my paternal relatives. My F’s brothers and cousins were refugees like he was, so most of the relatives are in the US and Canada.

So there’s also never been any incentive to learn the language, which I do sometimes feel is a shame.

It’s so fascinating to me that I’m not alone in this! I acknowledge on some level it could just be something to pin difficult feelings on, but thinking about it over the past few days, I think I wish there was a word for what I am. The thing about needing to choose may come from that? I’m guessing of course!

@TannyFickler Have you read any Zadie Smith? If not, I think you might enjoy her work immensely. The issues you’ve identified inform much of her writing.

What an interesting thread.

I grew up in 3 countries and feel part of them all. I also have a biracial child (we've been to his dad's country and met the family).

Someone upthread mentioned Third Culture Kids and I have the book. (Read it many years ago).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid#:~:text=Third%20culture%20kids%20%28%20TCK%29%20or%20third%20culture,a%20significant%20part%20of%20their%20child%20development%20years.

I also have the mixed heritage thing. I always felt special and interesting that my Dad wasn’t English. He came to the uk after the war from Poland having been conscripted at just 16 years old. He never got to live in his home country again and always struggled with the hand life dealt him. I feel proud of how resilient he was and proud my Dad had such an amazing story but I do totally get what you are saying OP, it feels like we don’t fit into either culture fully. I especially find irksome those forms where you tick your white background as British because often there is no other box, even though there are lots of people like us

@Lovereallywins very true about the box ticking.

One thing is I find is there is a bit of an expectation from many people that, well, European cultures and ethnicities are very similar anyway. This leaves me a bit confused and sad and not sure how to express myself when people don’t recognise the significance of straddling multiple European (or often sort of European maybe but not really if you knew more about it…) cultures.