English/French | Jamaican
Something that I have been struggling with recently is finding where I fit. I don’t feel that I connect much with being French or Jamaican. I mostly relate to being English, or British, because the UK is where I have been born and raised, but because of what I look like, I don’t always feel accepted by British society. I often feel like an outsider, especially amongst homogenous groups, and am most at home in a multicultural setting, which I can attribute both to my mixed background and my being from London. People need to face up to their own prejudices and do the work to deconstruct them. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’ve all been socially conditioned to think a certain way about certain types of people. I believe that acting subconsciously on this conditioning is the cause of a lot of microaggressions.
I often hide parts of my identity to avoid drawing attention to myself. It is a bad habit of mine to just let people assume things about me, including about my ethnicity, rather than speak up and make people rethink their judgements. It can be scary to open yourself up to criticism if someone doesn’t like what they’re hearing, but it is also exhausting keeping important parts of yourself hidden. As someone who is big on self-improvement, I am working on being braver and presenting my authentic self to the world. Sharing my story on this platform is one way I am doing this!
I would say that my younger brother is a role model for me. He is often the first person I go to when I want to talk about race because I know he’ll understand my experiences as a mixed-race person and be able to share his own. He is confident in his identity and encourages me to be bolder in how I interact with the world.
The positive side to this is that I can often see situations from an observer’s perspective and understand where different people are coming from. I find that I can get along well with most people, even if I disagree with them on certain issues. I love to play devil’s advocate in a debate because I can almost always see a clear line of argument for the opposing side.
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