The experience of being a mixed-race person in America can be described in one word – mixed.

Depending on how a mixed-race person looks and is perceived, the experience of being an ethnic or racially mixed person can vary the scope of a sociopolitical spectrum as broadly as one who identifies and is perceived as being mono-racial.

Race is a biological fantasy, but a social reality that affects the life experiences of millions of people every day in varying ways. There are some voices that dominate the conversation, some others that are beginning to gain traction, and others that are barely being heard at all or are being denied the opportunity to speak on their experiences.

Regardless, one part of the conversation that is not nearly brought up enough is the experience of mixed-race persons – people who experience the sensation of not belonging to one group or the other because of their “split” identities. What do you do when you are not one or the other, but both, and neither side fully accepts you?

For example, these demonstrations of rejection can range from looking too light-skinned to be part of their specific community, or being too dark; not knowing the language or specific knowledge of their community and thus not being a “real (ethnic group name)”; “acting white”; “you look too pretty to be (ethnic group name)”; “What are you?”, and these are but a few out of many.

These rejections, when practiced in communities of color and an overall dominantly white society, communicate to mixed-race persons that they are rendered ineligible to be members of either specific group because of their identities – that they are outsiders.

These rejections, subtle and overt, are micro aggressions – which are defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group,” said social researcher Derald Wing Sue. They are also unique to mixed-race people in a way that is not experienced by those who identify as belonging to a single racial or ethnic group.

“For a long time I struggled with the fact that I wasn’t just one race,” said WSU junior Victoria-Pearl Young. “(I am) Native American (Choctaw and Comanche Nations), Chinese, French and black. This is incredibly difficult because my cultural experience as an Afro-Latina, specifically Afro-Boricua, living in America gets discredited simply because I don’t look like what people expect. I constantly have to prove myself racially and culturally. Here at WSU, most of my peers just assumed I was completely Black simply because of my appearance, and that really used to bother me until I learned more about my history as a black individual.”

People of mixed-race identities are rejected both by a white supremacist society for being a person of color, and are rejected by their ethnic communities for not meeting the qualifications of being a member of that group because of their mixed identity. The communicated message from these collective micro aggressions is: there is no place for you.

Furthermore, “over time, being on the receiving end of these everyday (yet often unrecognizable) attacks can lead to depression, social isolation and lowered confidence,” according to Annie Liu of Everyday Feminism. “

Because we’ve been conditioned to question ourselves and not the perpetrators or the situations, we begin to wonder if our own feelings and experiences are legitimate. Sometimes, without understanding what we’re doing, we even internalize those aggressions and use them to police both our loved ones and ourselves.”

With such toxic rhetoric and consequences in place, how can mixed-race persons combat these mistreatments?

“Learn about your history,” said Young. “I feel as if people get so caught up in what they physically are without looking more into the history of who they are as a whole, and that by itself contributes to a mass amount of cultural conformism, and frankly, a significant amount of identity disparity on an individual level. You have such an incredible opportunity to connect with so many different people simply because you contain within you the roots of the world. Don’t let your mixed heritage hinder you into thinking you aren’t enough.”