British | Bajan
My Mum’s parents are from the UK, and my Dad’s parents are from Barbados. Both my Mum and Dad were born and raised in North West London. They met through shared friendship groups in the early 1990’s. I think that I first realised I was mixed-race around the age of 6 or 7. I remember my Mum and I were walking home with a school friend who questioned whether she was mixed-race because she had family that were both British and Mauritian. This was the first time I’d heard the term and recognised it as something that applied to me. As I’ve grown up in very multicultural areas of London, I’ve always been surrounded by people of various ethnicities. When I was much younger, I noticed differences in people’s appearance but felt no need to try to categorise people in any way. There were so many people around me that looked diverse from the colour of their skin to the texture of their hair. Yet, we all had a shared culture and I couldn’t see why there would be ways to differentiate us.
Understanding race as fluid rather than classified has stuck with me throughout my life and I definitely think that race as a human categorisation is a learnt construct. I think that a growing mixed-race society is great as it breaks down the ways that we separate people and use race as a way to highlight differences. I hope that in the future, people may come from such a variety of heritages that it will become more difficult to categorise people according to race and result in a greater acceptance of fluidity. I hope that this acceptance will encourage us all to be seen as equal.
I love that being mixed-race is essentially a result of the world connecting and different cultures creating and growing together. In my own family there are people of various races and backgrounds whether it be one of my half siblings or a distant cousin. I think that when you aren’t necessarily the same race as the rest of your family it helps you to view differences in race as something to celebrate rather than to be used to separate, which is something that I think is really beautiful.
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