British | African American

I identify as a queer Black man. My Dad is African-American, and my Mum is White British. I suppose I’ve always known I’m mixed-race, as I didn’t identify as Black until my late 20s. It was around 12 that I became acutely aware of what my skin colour means within the Black community. I don’t remember there being a combining of cultures or identities. Race wasn’t something any of us discussed in any great detail, and I never felt I had to choose between Black or white, as it were. I don’t think the challenges were linked to any mixed-race identity, rather it was linked to what my skin colour meant within Black spaces. I didn’t have that existential crisis around where I belonged because of my Whiteness or Blackness, though I did feel I wasn’t Black enough to live comfortably among other Black people. I feel very strongly connected to my African-American roots and I understand my identity now as part of the African-American tradition, which is to say, that I now identify as Black, regardless of whether people read me as Black or not. It’s hard to give a positive of being mixed-race. On one hand, I’ve resented being mixed-race before: I’ve previously felt that being mixed-race put me just outside what true belonging might feel like. To be mixed-race is to perhaps be in this in-between space. But on reflection, it has less to do with being mixed-race and more to do with not understanding that who I am, my mixed-race-ness as it were, is contained within Blackness. I think there are beautiful ruminations on what it means to be mixed-race, but I don’t think it’s a magical salve for race relations. I think there are expectations and racially-motivated ideas about what it means to be mixed-race, about the hope we embody by virtue of a mixing of cultures. I think the beauty of mixed-race might only be that two people came together in love and in nothing else, and that feels good: that my parents saw in each other what they wanted to create in the world. If I had the opportunity to be reborn I would want to return exactly as I am.

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