British/Trinidadian | Turkish
My Mum is mixed-race Black British and grew up in a tiny family, predominantly in a village just outside of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, called Sea Palling. My Mum’s Father was Joseph Emmanuel Victor and he was from Trinidad and came over in 1950, in the ebb of Windrush. He was a printer by trade but when he came to the UK found he couldn’t get back into it. He’d had a slot but he couldn’t slot back in. My Father is from Bursa, Turkey which is a large green city in north-western Turkey just across the Marmarus river from Istanbul and comes from a huge family. Growing up in the UK outside of a Turkish environment as well as outside of a Trinidadian one, my connection to my cultures could have been less tangential and more immersive if I'd have simply been in closer proximity to them. It's a shame but it's not stopped me from learning. In a way, I'm grateful that I get to build and grow my own relationship to my history, at an age where I can do so actively. Outside the occasional racist turn of phrase I experienced during high school, I acknowledge that as a light skin, able bodied, cis woman I have a lot of privileges that shield me from the difficulties that somebody else without those things might face. Light skinned mixed-race people in particular, experience a tremendous amount of privilege in blending into society and the current trends. We're often seen as exotic enough to be fulfil a diversity quota, or even an unconscious desire to modernize or shake things up, but at the same time close enough to Whiteness that we’re undisruptive or unthreatening. You only have to take a cursory look at the discourse in pop culture and in castings that call for ‘multiracial women only’ so see that racial ambiguity is highly favoured.
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