These are not the words of a child who is comfortable with her identity, but of one who is thoughtful, perplexed with uncertainty and troubled by it. Later on, Meghan spoke to her father, who told her that next time she should simply create her own box and tick that. This suggests that Meghan was trying to reconcile the conflicts arising out of being a child of colour who could be viewed by her peers as white and didn’t really know where she fitted in. Many other mixed-race Americans, being asked the same question, would have unquestioningly answered black. The fact that she did not shows that, even at that age, she had a more nuanced view of the subject than many others did. While she was not prepared to deny her African antecedents, nor was she prepared to resile away from her Caucasian. Because she did not look obviously mixed-race, and the only parent who seems to have had any profile at the school at that time was her father, many of her classmates simply assumed she was white. On one occasion, a cabal of girls even asked her to join a White Girls Only Club, her response being a non-explanatory, ‘Are you kidding me?’
By her own account, ‘my mixed race heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence.’ Later on, she would work through the conflict ‘to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.’ But before she could do so, she had to work her way through the grey to come to the light.
This early conflict would ultimately not only strengthen her but also deepen her. It gave her empathy for those who also did not fit in easily into one of life’s many boxes. According to her school friend Elizabeth McCoy, ‘If someone was being treated unfairly, she stuck up for them. She was a genuinely decent human being who looked out for people who needed help. She gave a damn about people other than herself.’
Her former homeroom advisor, Christine Knudsen, thought, ‘She’d take conversations to a deeper level. She had a lot of depth, probably because of her own experiences and hard knocks growing up,’ referring to her parents’ divorce, though equally the issues surrounding her racial identity must also have influenced Meghan’s thinking.
Tellingly, Knudsen did not remember race being an issue at all at the school. It was ‘not a big deal simply because our school is so diverse. There’s no looking down on someone because she comes from something different than you do.’ A recent breakdown of the diversity of the students shows that 35% were white, 20% Latina, 17% multiracial, 17% Asian or Pacific Islander, 5% black and 6% preferred not to state. The year Meghan graduated, the demographics were similar, the main difference being that there were slightly more black students. These figures mean that Meghan was by no means the only bi-racial student, and indeed, non-Caucasians being a two-thirds majority, she was in the majority rather than the minority, save as her appearance went.
The pattern that emerges is that the pressure Meghan was under regarding her race was to a large extent internal rather than external. She was being affected by the conflicts many other people of colour who inadvertently ‘pass’ for white have suffered throughout the ages. The singer Marsha Hunt once described her blue-eyed, blonde-haired grandmother of colour, by this time driven insane, staring at herself in the mirror befuddled as to how she could have been categorised as black when she looked white.
Meghan was a clever child and would grow into an intelligent woman. She had witnessed from early childhood how ‘my mom, caramel in complexion with her light-skinned baby in tow, (was) being asked where my mother was since they assumed she was the nanny.’ One would have to be lacking in empathy to fail to see how such experiences would have coloured the feelings of both mother and daughter. They would have had to be inhuman not to be embarrassed, annoyed, humiliated, aware of the cultural disparity between blacks and whites, and subject to a host of conflicting feelings, few of which would have been comfortable to experience. No child likes being different. No child wants to stand out from the crowd. No child wants to know that people think its mother is its servant. It is therefore understandable that no one has any memory of Meghan ever volunteering information on the subject of her race. Without actively concealing it, she was by omission avoiding the subject.
Because Immaculate Heart was a Catholic school, and Catholicism preaches that there are both sins of commission and omission, Meghan will have been aware that to omit to assert her identity was tantamount to a sin of omission. This awareness can have done nothing to reduce the pressure that she felt as she was mistaken for white, for while she never actively denied her heritage, and was indeed fond of her mother and her mother’s family, she also did not assert it actively. Such a dilemma would have been difficult for any child to endure. It must have driven her back into herself, and by her own account, she was a part of no special group and would volunteer for activities to avoid having to eat lunch alone. She was well liked by all and was friendly with many, but she had no actual circle of friends, felt isolated for all her superficial popularity, and was therefore already functioning as a solitary and independent unit. As she put it, ‘My high school had cliques: the black girls and white girls, the Filipino and the Latina girls. Being bi-racial, I felt somewhere in between. So every day during lunch, I busied myself with meetings - French club,
