Acting White: How I Will Explain This to my Mixed Kids

“She’s acting white.”

“She talks like a white girl.”

If you’re a Black woman like me, hearing this can sting—especially when the words come with an edge of judgment. The phrase acting white carries weight. It’s a loaded accusation wrapped in layers of cultural expectation, identity, and misunderstanding.

Hearing It Young

A few months ago, I talked to my middle school students about bullying. One girl had been singled out. Among the comments she heard? “You’re acting white.” When I asked her classmates what they meant, they looked confused. They didn’t know—they’d just repeated what they’d heard somewhere else.

I could relate. I’ve heard you talk white more times than I can count—growing up and even now, as an adult, from both white and Black folks. The first time I heard it, I was stunned. The subtext was clear: something about me didn’t fit.

Culture, Class, and Voice

I was born in New York but raised in the South. My parents, proud Jamaicans, were strict—especially about education. My dad made me look up every new word I asked him about, and speaking clearly was a must. We didn’t mumble or slur—we enunciated. Back then, I hated it. Now? I’m grateful.

Living on an Air Force base gave me a unique lens. My friends came from all over, and none of us thought twice about how each other spoke. But when we moved off base, things changed. Suddenly, my voice made me stand out. I remember middle school classmates—Black classmates—asking, “Why do you talk like that?”

I was confused, then ashamed. Why didn’t I sound Black enough to the kids who looked like me?

The Narrowness of Stereotypes

Comments like those didn’t come from kids who had lived in different states or countries. They often came from peers whose experiences were more limited. That difference in exposure shaped how we saw each other—and how we saw ourselves.

Now, as a mother raising biracial children in the South, I think about how I’ll prepare them for these moments. They’re growing up in a multiracial household, and they’ll encounter assumptions from both sides. As someone who writes about multiracial motherhood, I want to help them embrace every part of their identity.

If someone tells them they’re acting white, I want them to understand that the phrase says more about the speaker than about them. I want them to feel confident in who they are—Black, white, and beautifully themselves.

More Than Race

We’re shaped by more than our skin. Black motherhood, like all parenting, spans culture, class, environment, and experience. When you raise biracial kids, you learn quickly that identity isn’t one-dimensional.

I want my children to know that just because you share a race with someone, doesn’t mean your values or voice will match. And if someone judges you based on how you speak or look? That’s their limitation, not yours.

Let’s teach our kids to see the world broadly, speak with confidence, and know that identity isn’t a box—it’s a beautiful spectrum.

As a middle-class black southerner, I know that there are differences between white and black women in the south. If you start to overlap class, culture, and environment, those differences begin to fade.

If someone accuses them of acting white, I want them to embrace that, because they are half white. I don’t want them to take that as critisism, as I once did.

I want them to know that just because you may look like someone, doesn’t mean that you will automatically have things in common.

And if someone chooses to judge them because of how they look, well, we should feel sorry for them because their worldview is so small that they may have trouble functioning in the world.

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