The Zebra Effect

Many interracial marriages are borne out of love, while some are brought about deliberately because people are concerned with bearing beautiful babies. As simple as this fact may seem, there are many folks in our society who are enamored by having mixed, exotic babies.

However, despite even the most calculated couplings, DNA and genes tend to take over. Sometimes the children are borne with more caucasian features, while others have a mixture of features, or there are those who show no signs of having any mixture whatsoever.

When I was born I had curly hair, a bindi on my forehead and my features were predominantly white. As I got older, I began developing color, although my complexion was peaches and creme it looked as if I had colored myself with a crayon.

There were times in my life when onlookers thought my coloring was unnatural. As I got older, my mother wanted my hair to be straighter, so she took me to the beauty parlor to make it happen when I was about three years old. From the time I was three I had weekly appointments with my beautician to keep my hair in its vanilla glory.

While my mother was beautifying my hair on one end, my father was straightening my schnauzer on the other end. Every moment we were alone, he would dab his fingers with saliva and begin the straightening process. As I got older I began using clothes pins to keep the process going.

The fact of the matter is that men and women inter-marry so that they can have beautiful children. But there are times when nature is not cooperative and one or both parents become dissatisfied. It is then, they begin resorting to all sorts of tactics like skin bleaching, beauty treatments and shunning certain activities not to appear too ethnic.

I remember when one set of my cousins were born, although their mother was Chinese and their father was Indian, the children’s mother was convinced that if they did not come out as she anticipated, she had already saved up a fund for their rhinoplasty and hair straightening.

Many observers will look at these drastic measures and call them too stringent. But, in the world of Zebras, people have pre-conceived notions and expect mixed children to look a certain way and act accordingly. When they fall short of human expectations, they are ostracized and meant to feel as if they are misanthropes of society.

Eventually they begin to feel as if they do not fit in anywhere on the race wheel, which makes life tedious and quite grueling……

If a child comes out too caucasian looking then he/she becomes segregated from the parent which is not of caucasian descent because the other side of the family wants to groom him/her into acting more vanilla. The zebra life is never an easy one because it is constantly filled with suspicious looks and other ignorant people’s ridicule.