Rethinking My Racial and Ethnic Identity

My maternal grandfather died more than two years ago, but he’s only recently become a real person to my family. The more time that goes by, the more we learn about him. Just yesterday, my mother shared something with me that she learned from my grandmother that threw me for a loop: My grandfather was part African American.

I always assumed (and so did my mother) that my sister and I were fairly normal descendants of a family of Hungarian immigrants with a sprinkling of Western European on my mother’s side thrown into the mix. We grew up eating Hungarian food, hearing Hungarian spoken, and celebrating Hungarian traditions.

Now that I have this new notion of where I came from, I can’t help but feel a bit betrayed by my family for not discussing our African American heritage openly. And now that my grandfather is gone, I feel a sense of lost opportunity to get answers to really hard questions I have about my family. I can’t also help but feel cheated out of a whole different set of traditions and food that I’ll never have access to now. As a 25 year-old adult, I thought I was in a place where my identity and heritage were pretty solidified. Now I have to rethink everything I assumed about my racial and ethnic identity, even though I haven’t changed at all.

I’ve tried to do some math to figure out just how much of me is African American, but I can only speculate on the missing limb of my family tree. If one of my grandfather’s parents was African American, that makes me 1/8 Black. If one of my grandfather’s grandparents was African American, that makes me 1/16 Black. At what fraction does it stop mattering when I try to conceive of myself as a whole person made up of different ethnic and racial components?