Colin

age: 22
career: actor
originally from: queens, new york
fun fact: I have four fake teeth!

So I was born in Queens, but grew up in a suburb outside of New York City, 45 minutes north of the city. I grew up in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood and went to public schools until high school. And then I went to boarding school in 10th grade and that really fucked my whole life and sense of self up. Growing up, I resented my mom (my mom is white), because I kind of resented whiteness growing up. I just wanted to be very separate from it. And I thought she was always super corny. And all my friends were black Latinos, and Kids just want to feel included. But then I went to boarding school, and all of a sudden I had to cling to this proximity to whiteness. And that shifted my entire sense of self on on its axis. I was very confused. These white people have money and power, so all of a sudden, I couldn’t just shun them in my mind. And I suddenly felt subservient, which is crazy.

I was so, so conscious of how I talked to everyone around me and how everyone was perceiving me. Because there's also a thing where no one knew what the fuck I was.

Did you ever get that question? “What are you?”

Yeah, every day in and out, it's just whether they were calling me Mexican, or they were calling me black. I was dating this girl at the end of my sophomore year who was a junior and she called me one night. She said, “my friends told me I can't be with you because you're black”. And I was like, what! What!? I was 15 or 16. But also, it wasn't shocking. I remember thinking about all the fuckshit that happened in boarding school and just normalizing it, just feeling so “this is it”. I feel like I'm also very adaptable, to a flaw, where I just accept the environment so much that it felt like this is it, I'm just so mediocre, I'm worth less than these people, that’s just is what it is.

So I guess I really struggled with race in high school. But it wasn't until I got to college, and I think started to just be more aware of who I was, in terms of my family, and everyone around me that I realized that my mom saw me as her white son, which was a big thing for me. That was kind of tough for me to understand. The summer after my freshman year of college, I was talking about something that happened to me, some racial, prejudice thing happened to me. And she was like, no, there's no way, very much dismissed it. She was basically gaslighting me and I told my dad and he was like, yeah, I mean, you’re probably right. It's just interesting, hearing those two things. There’s a lot of dissonance. There's a lot of dissonance between my parents in that respect.

In a practical way, we never spoke French in the house (my dad’s family speaks French), I'm the only one in my family doesn't speak French. And as a kid, I didn’t really care. But now I think, man, you just erased that whole part. I think my mom was actually pretty ignorant of that, and a lot of other things. There's just that dissonance of her raising me as a white son. She used to say, oh, I don't see color.

Do you think she still thinks of you as her white son?

We've had a lot of conversations in the past three years. And my sister also is very on her about stuff. She's definitely come around in certain ways. And is trying to do better. As much as I think she's stuck in her ways, she’s trying to be better. At this point, I'm kind of just over it. But I also think that it's also why I've also never felt close to my parents. I've seen a lot of my friends be a lot closer to their parents and have really strong relations with them and can treat them as friends or whatever. And I just feel very, very, very disconnected from my parents. I can't exactly pinpoint exactly why. But I feel that's all kind of a reason. 

I think he [my dad] really wanted to have this kind of proximity to whiteness, you know? When my friends came over, he would call him vagabonds and be very condescending to some of my friends and the circles I used to hang around with. And that was interesting. His family is all light skinned Haitians. And from my understanding, they're the bougie ones, the bourgeoisie of Port-au-Prince. They basically look down on everyone darker than them. And now being in America, they are just trying to attain this proximity to whiteness as much as they can. We had this family email thread, with my mom's [white] brothers and sisters ­– and two of my mom's brothers say some fuckshit a lot. My sister and I will call them out, but my dad will be so apologetic for them. And always try to appease them and take their side, you know, and I think that just says a lot.

After I left home and went to boarding school, a lot of the next six years was searching for how to fit into POC [people of color] spaces again, in a way that felt natural and reminiscent of my growing up. And I think that was very difficult in numerous spaces over the years because I always felt like if I wasn't getting along with people, it was because I was half white, you know? That was something that was really annoying to me.