AN ODE TO MY WELL TRAVELED, MIXED-RACE FAMILY

My family and I took several trips as a child - every summer, we would visit my family in India, spending several weeks with relatives I saw only yearly. Besides that, we would take small trips here and there - maybe to the Caribbean, or Europe; California or Atlanta.

I thought it wasn’t enough. I went to a pwi, except imagine the K-12 version. Friends would visit the Hamptons, St. Barths, Greece, Italy; coming back after spring break or the summer, or even a weekend, with tales of the restaurants they had visited, the hotels and the beaches they stayed at and lounged on. I wanted to spend summers and spring breaks like that - who wants to visit your family, drink chai and eat dosa everyday? Certainly not I!

Of course, I now look back at those days with a dry sense of humor. The lengths at which I ventured to hide my identity, something I find to be so inherently part of me that I still haven’t figured it out just yet. And it’s with this thought that I began to think about my family trips, and not about the thoughts I had of wishing I could just whisk away to my family’s Hamptons home, but instead, just how unique traveling as a black family, a black mixed family, was and still is.

I began to reflect on the lack of other children who looked like my brothers and me while traveling. I didn’t see fathers who looked like my own dad. I did, however, see plenty of people who looked like my mom - aunties in saris and sneakers, baseball caps and shoulder bags. Uncles in collared shirts and Nike sneakers. I thought about how strange it would be to see another black family at the hotel, at the restaurant - the museum, and even the airplane. We would count the families we saw, and I would think to myself; I wonder where they’re from?

It’s even funnier to me that my longing to have a Hamptons home, to visit St. Barths during spring break, to take a pony ride on the beach in Greece, was not due to my longing to be, let’s say, white. No, it was more that I didn’t see anyone who looked like us, like my family, on vacation. I didn’t want to be the only ones.

But this was the early to mid 2000’s - dare I say now, things are different. I follow several black female travel influencers, or simply other travelers of color (like friends of mine) who travel with their children, wanting to show them the world. I like to think that’s how I’ll be one day as well.