I can count the number of biracial men and women I know on one hand. I have a younger sister and brother, and two cousins who also have a white mother and a black father. I grew up not seeing myself represented in the media.

When people talk about representation they usually speak broadly, there aren’t enough Asians, African Americans, Latinos, Pacific Islanders, etc. I agree, there 100% needs to be more of each of these ethnicities, and every other ethnicity that isn’t white, but I also want to see more people like me! Up until the show Blackish, I could not name a biracial actor in a TV show that they explicitly said was half black, half white. Aubrey Graham, Drake, is biracial, and he was in Degrassi, but it is never said that his character was biracial.

There are plenty of biracial celebrities out there, we had a biracial president, but there isn’t a great representation in the media of our lives and our struggles. That’s part of the reason I love Blackish so much! Rainbow, the mother, is biracial, with a black mother and a white father, and constantly struggles between her black self and her white self. I want more characters like that! More characters that are confused about what block to check off when it asks you what your ethnicity is. More characters that don’t know how to act around black people OR white people. More characters that spend their childhood trying to figure out how to be the perfect mix of their white culture and their black culture.

It’s hard to grow up biracial. There’s always an internal struggle of being too black or being too white, and reversely, not being black enough or not being white enough. It’s something that I always have and continue to struggle with. Seeing characters in TV shows and movies deal with the same problems as you, make your problems and issues feel more normal. The more issues such as this are talked about, the more people speak up about them, the more people feel comfortable with these issues.

SOOOOOO hire more biracial actors, write more plots about biracial people, and all in all talk more about biracial issues!