WATCH: Real-life transracial – ‘I was raised white so I don’t identify as black’

If you think you have seen it all, possibly not. A video of a black woman saying she identifies as white has gone viral.

Actress and filmmaker Mari van Heerden has turned heads with a snippet of her sit down interview with Relebogile Mabotja on SABC.

The talk show’s topic was transracial identity and black children raised by adoptive white parents, identifying as white. Van Heerden has starred in series such as in 7de Laan and Geraamtes in die Kas.

She was raised by her grandmother as her biological parents weren’t able to. She was eventually adopted by the Van Heerden family who her grandmother worked for. The Afrikaans family lived on a farm in the North West.

Explaining her black family’s dynamic and how she got adopted, she said her parents had her as teenagers and her grandmother took her in, realising the “toxic” family they were bringing her up in.

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Mari says she was aware at a young age that she didn’t fit in.  She was the only black child at her primary school. “I spoke Afrikaans and all the other kids were like you’re not supposed to speak Afrikaans, you’re supposed to speak a black language and I couldn’t. It was difficult because I couldn’t really fit in anywhere, I wasn’t black enough but I also wasn’t white enough, it was hard.”

She said the kids were mean and made sure she felt different because she was black. Mari says her white parents never had a conversation about race and how she was going to be treated differently.

“From the get-go, I knew I was different. I am adopted but we never had a serious talk.”

The biggest talking point was her identification.

Mari says: “I don’t identify as being black. I was brought up white, so I couldn’t learn how to be black. So now, from the beginning, I was raised white… I always thought of marrying a white man. It’s not like I can’t identify with being black, it’s just that I never learned how to and I never had the opportunity to learn from black people.”

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Host, Mabotja then asked the question of people who would say: “She should be able to speak her black language, Tswana.”

Mari answered: “I should but I didn’t have the opportunity to. My gran learned Afrikaans working for the Van Heerden family. Yes I picked up a few things, she tried to teach me but it was never like you have to learn your language.”

American TV comedy series Atlanta also looked into this complex matter. An episode on the first season of Donald Glover’s (Childish Gambino) show, introduced a character by the name of Antoine Smalls who believes he’s a white man.

“I’m a 35-year-old white man,” he says to the correspondent, Nathan Wielder.

Wielder explains that Smalls has a “trans-racial identity” and now identifies as Harrison Booth from Colorado. Fans of the show loved how “real” this episode was and how it was a conversation starter in a very humorous way.