English | Jamaican/Chinese
My Dad is English. My Mum was born in Britain, but her parents came over from Jamaica in the 1950s. My Mum’s Father is half-Chinese. My parents met when they both worked for Tate and Lyle in the 1970s and have been together for over 40 years. Whenever my parents talked about their relationship, they described it as the most normal and natural thing in the world. It’s only as I’ve got older that I’ve started to realise some of the prejudice they must have faced. I think they played down what certain family members thought when they first got together, so that it wouldn’t affect my relationship with them. Although I’m glad to have a more realistic understanding of what they experienced now that I’m older, I’m grateful that they allowed me to grow up without thinking that race could ever be a barrier to love.
Being mixed-race allows you to very quickly acknowledge that not everyone in life has the same experience, and I think that has made me a more compassionate, understanding person. However, I’m also very aware that I come from a loving, middle-class family, that I have light skin, that I had access to a great education, and all of this gives me a huge amount of privilege. I’m a History Teacher and love looking at the history of race relations, whether that be the Civil Rights Movement in America or the Windrush generation in the UK. I feel like my racial heritage sometimes gives me a more personal, emotional connection to these events, which I think makes a difference in my lessons. As a teacher, my philosophy has always been that teaching compassion is integral to what we do - caring about and empathising with the people from the past is just as important as learning about what they did. I am so fortunate to never have experienced those levels of discrimination, and my ethnicity does not make me automatically qualified to discuss these subjects. It does however encourage me to show my pupils that a consideration of different perspectives and experiences is so important in everything that we do.
Want to read more? – Subscribe here #mixedracefaces