Welsh/Trinidadian | Scottish/Ghanaian
My Mother is half Trinidadian half Welsh. My Father is half Ghanaian half Scottish. So, I have two mixed-race parents, which comes with its own set of problems and benefits. My Father wasn’t massively present, so the Ghanaian culture wasn’t integrated into my everyday life.
I am enveloped by my British culture as I live and work in London, so this includes everything that comes with that. My Welsh and Scottish cultures are underutilised if I’m honest. My Ghanaian culture I have recently been taking an in-depth interest in. Sourcing fabrics for clothing and furniture. I’m planning on going to Ghana in 2021 to hopefully develop some working relationships and to understand more about where I come from. My Trinidad culture is present in my everyday life. From the language/slang I use, to the music I listen to and the food I cook/eat.
I have had negative experiences due to my ethnic backgrounds. This has generally come in the form of being asked (normally not explicitly) to ‘join a side’. There are no sides, I imagine many people would disagree with this sentiment, but this is what I believe. I have also experienced too many times to count, certain people believing that I must be a drug dealer, or some type of thug. In other instances, some strained experiences of not being ‘enough’ of each culture. My family brought me up to be thick skinned and these comments generally rolled off like water off a duck’s back.
I’m self-employed, so my workplace has been created by myself. My industry is that of commercial casting and event staffing is one that originally was not inclusive. It is no secret that modelling and castings in the past has tried to perpetuate a stereotype of what beauty is and what is expected as acceptable. My agency (@iamcastings) promotes diverse and inclusive representation within the consumer-able media space. I came to do this after experiences and seeing how insidious this agenda was with the industry. Within staffing there are less barriers of inclusion, but it is there. We work in the same vein of where possible to give a balanced representation of staff and performers.
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