Growing up, I faintly recall my cousins saying to me, “You’re lucky you’re mixed.” Now, as a 17-year-old high school senior, bound for Tufts University, a college in the Northeast with black students making up less than 5 percent of the student population, just what that designation means is becoming clearer and simultaneously, more confusing.

While I have spent most of my life stuck between two different cultures, I am preparing to enter a world where neither of them is dominant nor there to comfort me. Thus, the aberrantly high expectations set for multi-racial people in our society are becoming more apparent.

People with mixed ancestry are expected to be atypically attractive (or at least have babies that are considered to be “the cutest”) and speak more than one language (“You speak ‘Mexican’, right?”). In addition, I’m asked to be a champion of both cultures and down to appreciate multiple stereotypes of who I am, as if one weren’t enough. Friends and strangers alike fidget with with my hair like it’s an experiment in a petri dish, and in the winter, when my tan goes away, my complexion is a conversation starter. People try to guess the races of my parents and ask why I don’t have an accent.

Not only are these expectations ridiculous, they do nothing to help others appreciate who we truly are. If I could identify as just human, with no specific connection to a race or an ethnicity, I would. But for the sake of convenience and comfort, I do identify with my parents’ ancestry – my mom is a first-generation Mexican American, and my dad is black.

I take great pride in my bi-racial heritage and have great appreciation and love for both cultures. The community that I belong to in the context of race is the biracial one- represented by a President in the flesh, yet, quite unknown and unheard of in mainstream culture and media. My story is one of merged worlds; tamales con fideos y frijoles on Saturday and fried chicken with greens and yams on Sunday.

Being a part of a community of people who defy classification and learn to love themselves outside of a label has made me appreciate humanity even more, and for that I am thankful.