British | Jamaican
I identify as a mixed-race Black, queer, woman. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall to have seen the moment my parents met. They met in the Monte Carlo club in Handsworth in the 80s. My parent’s dance styles are really quite different, it’s funny to think about how they approached each other on the dance floor and what drew them together. They both really enjoy dancing so I think it’s pretty cool that they met doing that. Maybe I get my love of dancing from them. My Mum told me she used to go to lots of Black clubs back in the day with her best friend because they loved the music and they loved to dance. My Dad told me that a lot of White people used to go to the ‘Monte’ in Handsworth, and that Black clubs were quite mixed. He said there were White women who’d married Jamaicans in there, lots of Irish women.
My Dad was born in St Thomas, Jamaica and moved to England in the 60s to join his parents who moved some years before. He came to England with his brother and sister who were all raised by their Grandparents in Jamaica. My Dad was in his late teens when he moved to England I think. My Mum is White British and was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. My Mum moved to Birmingham for college 1977 when she was 19. My parents were together for 8 years before they had me.
I really don’t know fully how my parents combined their different cultures, I asked my Mum this and she said, ‘me and your Dad just fancied each other, and that was that’. She can’t recall any clashes of culture between them, apart from about how to discipline me and my brother, which they disagreed on. When I asked my Dad he just replied that he ‘didn’t have any problems’. My Mum and Dad do things quite differently, so I can’t imagine that there wasn’t a merging or compromising somewhere. But also, my Dad had been in England for around 20 years before he met my Mum and had children with other White women, so maybe combining cultures wasn’t a new or a big thing for him. My parents never lived together either and so I think this is perhaps also why combining cultures wasn’t a thing that came up for them.
My Dad took my Mum to Jamaica for a month with his family before they had me. My Mum talks really fondly of my family there and of being received warmly. Other than things being slower in Jamaica than over here, she didn’t mention any major cultural differences. She did mention that my Dad’s family home felt really traditionally English. I guess that’s down to Colonialism and British rule in Jamaica and Britishness being forced to interweave with Jamaican way of life. It’s interesting but also quite difficult to think about what Jamaican culture really is and might be, without the invasion of British culture and values.
Combining cultures in their relationship might not have been something either of my parents were conscious of but I can see moments of my parents being conscious of my mixed identity. My Mum has mentioned that she was happy that my child minder was a Black Caribbean woman so that I had a connection to that side of my identity when I was very young through her, my Dad has never lived with us. I remember that my Dad used to take me to carnival each year, he would buy me hair oil from Black hair shops (though he never taught me how to style or do my hair…no one did. I’m still sad about it) and he would try and teach me how to cook Jamaican food. I’ve asked him if he ever thinks about his children being mixed-race and he said, ‘not really’, and that’s all I got.
I have projected a lot onto my parent’s relationship, wondering how cultural differences never came up, negatively or positively, and wondering how they didn’t have conversations about things like this, especially knowing they wanted to have children together. Race feels like such a big thing in my life that I can’t imagine being in a relationship and it not being something that was present or spoken about. But a friend recently told me that, the history I have been told is all I’ll ever know from my parents, that the lenses they looked through things were not the same as mine, and that that’s just how it goes. She suggested that I move more towards appreciating the story my Mum told me of my parents’ union as a love story and stop looking for more that may never have been there. I’m not sure I’m done exploring and questioning yet though.
My view on interracial relationships is complicated. I believe in following your heart, if you’re right for each other and you’re happy then race shouldn’t come into it. But I am also pro-Black love. I feel frustrated that we rarely get to see positive relationships depicted of Black couples, of all sexualities in mainstream media. Especially within LGBT communities in the UK and US, we rarely see LGBT couples of the same ethnicity. There is lots of visibility of White couples, and interracial couples that we get to see. There is a lot of internalised racism within our LGBT communities that we need to work through and so for this reason, I’m definitely politically pro-Black love.
I don’t like that interracial relationships are seen as a sign of racism dying out or of multiculturalism working. I think that’s a really simplistic and misguided notion. The exoticising of interracial relationships frustrates me deeply, they’re held up as the respectable face of multicultural Britain, where we are all getting along so happily, free of racism. I have heard the narrative so many times of White women wanting Black partners to have ‘beautiful mixed-race babies’. There is so much that is wrong with statements like that and it’s really sad that colourism isn’t a conversation that is happening louder in the UK, outside of Black communities.
I was recently listening to Black, lesbian poet PJ Samuels, who said, if you are going to be with a Black person, you have to love all Black people, to love Blackness. Not in an exoticising way, but in a way to say that your Black partner is not an exception, they are part of a wider world of Black people and Blackness, and to not love Blackness in its entirety, can you really deeply love your Black partner? This really resonated with me. Having heard many narratives about racism that people experience within interracial relationships and from their own and their partners’ wider family too, I think PJ Samuels’ sentiment is really poignant. Interracial relationships are not a pass to prove you’re not racist. I know lots of interracial couples that have so much love in their relationships and I wouldn’t like to think people would throw away the potential for love, based on having different backgrounds but there is still work that white people, and people of colour need to do to unpick the racism and prejudice we’ve internalised.
My Dad told me he’s never had a Black girlfriend, and that when he moved here in the early 60s, there weren’t many single Black women around at all. Mainly Black women he knew had come from Jamaica with their boyfriends and husbands. He said the generation after him, Black Jamaican’s born in the UK mostly had relationships with Black people. Lots of Jamaicans of my Dad’s generation in Birmingham married White women, mainly Irish women he said. My Dad told me ‘when we come here, we take the pressure off the Irish. English people didn’t like the Irish. Neither us or the Irish could rent rooms’. In my Dad’s experiences, lots of Black Jamaican men and white Irish women built friendship, relationships and community together.
Thoughts on interracial relationships have definitely shifted a lot since my parents and Grandparents’ generation. Both my parents have talked about racism they either experienced or witnessed back in the day. Neither have many negative experiences in relation to their relationship but I can guess from the racism that they’ve spoken about, that interracial relationships were less acceptable. Growing up in Birmingham I knew and saw lots of mixed-race people my age. Mixed-race people are one of the fastest growing populations in the UK and so I think that in itself as a statistic highlights that our thoughts on interracial relationships have changed and are changing.
Of all my meaningful relationships all but one of my partners have been women of colour, half of them have been women who are mixed-race, having a White British and a Black Jamaican parent like me. I can’t say that I consciously chose my partners based on their ethnicity, but of all my partners who have been Black or mixed-race Black like me, our shared heritage and experiences have been positively significant to our unity. I think being queer and a mixed-race Black woman, that sharing this intersection has been something I have found comfort in with the women I have been with. My partner and I have been together for 2 and half years, her family on both sides are Black Jamaican and this shared culture is interwoven throughout our relationship, it shapes what and the way we eat, our language, work, opinions, politics, comforts, style, our families. It’s something both spoken and unspoken between us. We of course have differences too, we are not a match inherently because of our shared heritage but is definitely something that unifies us. If I were single again, I think this would be something I’d notice not having, were my partner and I not to share this. It’s probably additionally important to me because my connection to Jamaican culture outside of myself and my relationship, is largely through my Dad and his family, friends and community in Birmingham and London. Living in Manchester, and not living in a Caribbean community, not having that closeness to me, makes the importance of me and my partners’ shared culture and heritage even more precious.
I think talking about positive experiences of being mixed-race can feel uncomfortable. I definitely think I have benefited from having lighter skin and having more European features within my work life, within how I moved through the world, my communities and in dating spaces. Fairer skinned mixed-race people are seen as less threatening, more palatable, more attractive, more ‘exotic’ and although I don’t want to put all of my achievements down to having been on this side of racial discrimination, it’s something I can’t ignore or not think about. It’s something I try to talk about and keep in my mind. I’m conscious of positions of power in my work and in my communities that I occupy and use that to call out and challenge racism and share the platforms I have with my Black siblings where I can.
One thing I do think is cool about being mixed-race is platforms like Mixedracefaces that give space to explore mixed-race identities and experiences. I’ve always gravitated towards other mixed-race people, especially with similar heritage to me, in search for common experiences and understanding myself and others. In a nosy way, but also in a way that helps me to understand myself differently and reflect on my experiences with different lenses. I really enjoy seeing where my intersections of identity overlap and diverge with others. In my work with young people, even though there are things about my identity that I’m still figuring out, my work has given me a platform to be a ‘possibility model’ for younger mixed-race people and use my experiences to understand theirs.
Until thinking about answering these questions and talking to others about some of them, I hadn’t consciously deemed or even acknowledged really, the impact that not having many mixed-race role models in my world has had on me. I saw Black people of all hues in the world and in my world, but I don’t think I’ve had emotionally intimate and more conscious relationships with Black and mixed-race Black people until my late teens and early twenties. I think some of the thoughts I have about my own appearance and identity are linked to having fewer mixed-race role models in my life. Especially older mixed-race people, who may have perhaps represented possibilities of who we can be, the diversity of how we look and identify ourselves, how to do our hair!! My increasing interest in seeking out mixed-race narratives and visibility in my later life, is in part a manifestation of having limited access to this growing up. I’m drawn to other mixed-race people who have a Black and a White parent like me, it interests me to see how we are made up, which bits of each of our parents we’ve inherited. I definitely think some of this comes from a celebration of our mixedness but I do recognise that some of this comes from a more negative place, connected to how I feel about my identity. A place that has in the past, and at times now, makes me feel less than in some way for having facial features that are more European, for my skin being lighter or my hair having looser curls. I feel like these things push me away from markers of Blackness I’ve digested from the world and are features I have at times wanted to change. It’s an uncomfortable place to be in. It’s something I’m trying to push through in exploring, valuing and celebrating the diversity of Blackness and of mixedness. Platforms like Mixedracefaces have been insightful and significant in this journey to acceptance and celebration of who I am and who we are.
I feel strongly connected to my Jamaican heritage through music, food, friends and family. My language is littered with Patois and it gets thicker around Black friends and family. Hearing dub and reggae is like soul food, it’s healing. The smell of jerk anything, or of rice and peas smells like home, which in some ways is strange as what I call home is my Mum's house, and we never ate Jamaican food or listened to Jamaican music growing up there. I don’t feel like I connect to my White culture. To be honest, I struggle to define markers of what that is for me. My Mum’s family are White Jewish French, Jewish German and far back they are Irish but I’ve never grown up with this in my life. I just have my Mum and a loose connection to my Aunt and cousins. And so, I feel connected to my Mum personally, but I don’t feel connected to her culture. I think I see her as being without culture. I see my Mum’s values, her likes, dislikes and ways of life but I wouldn’t connect that to her being White/British culture. It’s weird. Whereas my Dad is very Jamaican. How he speaks, his friends, his values, his house, his food and ways. I can’t disconnect those things from him and I feel very connected to these things too. It has been highlighted to me that I am both Black and White and so should have an appreciation of both cultures that have shaped me, but the balance is tipped heavily towards Black/ Jamaican culture. I’m sure living in Jamaica would make me miss familiarities of this island, my life here, what I know and how it’s shaped me but because I live in England maybe I take it for granted or it’s just there in the background. I find it difficult to connect with the idea of celebrating my White British ‘side’ or culture. I don’t feel significantly connected to Britain and I don’t feel that I can celebrate Britain. A Britain that currently and in the past has committed atrocities on Black people and people of colour here and across the world. Actions that have impacted on my family and so many others and of which we still feel the legacy of today. What I do feel strongly connected to however, is Black queer Britain, to Black Britain, and the African and Caribbean diaspora here.
I’ve not been to Jamaica or to Huntingdon (as an adult, I went as a toddler). I really long to go to Jamaica and for my Dad to take me and show me around the island. I want to know where and how he grew up. My Dad is 76 and I think as he gets older, he gets less interested in going back. I have a group of queer Black and mixed-race Black friends who have Jamaican heritage, and we have talked a few times about going there together, to experience our homelands, and to experience and explore it together as queer Black women and non-binary people. There are equal parts anxieties and excitement about going for me, plus the barrier of the expense. But I think it would be a really healing and grounding experience. I have such a clear idea in my head about what Jamaica is like and at the same time it’s really cloudy too. What I know is based on hearing and seeing bits of other people’s experiences of the Island, of music videos and the media. Going to Jamaica to explore it for myself is something I absolutely have to do.
My thoughts on my mixed-race identity eb and flow, and the amount I think about it fluctuates too. I hope as I grow older I’ll grow more chilled and grounded about things. As a child I lived in a really mixed area of Birmingham, I had friends from lots of different backgrounds and so being mixed-race wasn’t something that I was conscious of a lot of the time. I do remember feeling different to some of my Black friends at primary school. I remember pretending to be Christian for a while because that was a commonality I saw among my Black friends and my Black family. I remember wanting to have my hair styled in ways my Black girlfriends had theirs. I remember wanting the tan I got during summer to stay. I never felt this way of wanting, about my White friends and things they did or had. Though generally as a child, I felt loved and valued in my friendship groups in and outside of school and by my family. When I got to secondary school in my later years I fell in with a more alternative crowd. Alternative scenes at the time and still now felt very White and so my mixedness and Blackness was something that I felt set me apart from a lot of the people I knew, and at the same time I felt distanced from Blackness and Black people too. Alternative music and aesthetics isn’t something I ever saw many Black people into and I think it confused some of the Black friends I did have, that I would be into that kind of music. Realising I was gay too I think mentally for me distanced me for a while from Blackness. I blame lack of queer Black visibility and of alternative Black visibility on me feeling like this and how others felt towards me.
As I’ve grown older, more conscious of race and become part of more Black and communities of colour, I’ve seen myself. I’ve really grown into who I am. Into feeling more at home in me and more grounded. Living in a city as diverse as Manchester has been really significant to this growth. It’s racially diverse, it’s queer, it’s political and I’ve found myself among good people here and in lots of different and overlapping communities. The mixedness of these communities is something I really enjoy.
If I were to be born again, I’d like to say that I’d be born the same way. But if I were to change one thing, it would be to have been more grounded and at home in my identity earlier in my life and to have sought out people who nourished the whole of me earlier. Both my parents have made and shaped me, my mixedness of both my Mum and Dad, is at the core of who I am, if I were born again, I’d never want to change that.