This article was from our first magazine about a teenager named Ana. She's an Indian-American intersectional feminist who created We Are NOT Alone, a website empowering sexual abuse survivors to share their stories. This article is about her feeling like she doesn't fit in as a person of color in a mostly white school and a majority white country. To read the full magazine, click here.
"I've been called a coconut so many times, brown on the outside, white on the inside, coconut, rotten banana... From first grade to fifth grade, I would look at myself in the mirror, but I couldn't relate to the girl in the mirror looking back at me, I thought like everybody else, I spoke like everybody else, but for some reason I didn’t look like them. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I didn't look like them" There's a Hindu festival that Ana celebrates: "We sing two prayers, even then sometimes, I’m not able to fully get in the zone, if people from my school saw me here, would they judge me?" At school and in her social life, Ana just wanted to fit in; she didn't want to be seen as an outsider or different. "If Indian people came up in the conversation, I would back away or be quiet because I didn’t want to be associated with Indian culture. Growing up an Indian girl in a mostly white world, you kind of feel like a fruit loop in a bag of cheerios and that’s really scary."
*Article edited for website
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