English | English/Guyanese
My Dad always had a British passport but when him and his family settled in England, my Grandma was one of the only Black women in the village. I remember a story they used to tell me about the pub in that village, where my Grandfather overheard a local man saying that ‘the Blacks were moving in’. My Mum said she never thought about the fact that my Dad might have been perceived differently in the North East due to his skin colour and thankfully nobody in my Northern family batted an eyelid when they got together. I think because my Father moved around so much when he was younger, much like me, maybe he never fully connected to his Guyanese heritage either.
Growing up in Spain and moving around really opened my eyes to all the different kinds of people that exist in the world. I speak Spanish fluently due to having lived in Spain, and even though this isn’t connecting with my familial culture, it helps me connect with the wider world. I wouldn’t say it was a culture I ‘own’, but I do deeply identify with.
When I was younger I never thought twice about the fact that I’m mixed. I never questioned it because I lived in a country where I didn’t actually have any familial connection to. When I moved to the UK however and I became a teenager I started seeing how exoticized mixed-race people, of any mix, are. I have been exoticized by men before; often hearing the term ‘light skin’ or ‘exotic’, which on reflection makes me feel like these people were looking at me through a glass case in a museum.
I just thought of myself as British, I’d always had a British passport, and then someone at University asked me if I saw myself as Black and I honestly couldn’t answer that, as I’d never thought about it. I love being mixed. I love being able to prompt wider discussions about identity and race with different people. With all the recent events that have happened, I think it is important to keep these discussions alive. We must never let prejudice win.
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