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. In terms of my own views on interracial relationships, I’ve always thought that a funny quirk about being mixed-race, particularly for those of us with several different ethnicities/nationalities, is that the only type of relationship we experience is interracial. It would be pretty difficult for me to restrict the dating pool to just guys who were a mixture of English, Jamaican and Chinese! Even if I were to date a mixed-race man, his racial identity and experience would likely be so different to my own, that I would still consider it to be an interracial relationship. The result of this, dating outside my ethnicity is all I know, and I’m fortunate to say that I’ve never faced any prejudice or discrimination as a result of this.
I was raised in the Home Counties, went to a grammar school and then to Oxford. All of these places were overwhelmingly White. The vast majority of my friends are White, and all the boys I have dated have been White. I don’t think that this has been a deliberate choice; it’s a result of the social circle I’ve grown up in. I sometimes wonder if this reflects badly on me, as if I were hiding or denying part of my heritage, but I strongly believe that expecting someone to choose a partner based on their ethnicity, whatever that may be, is downright archaic. Perhaps I’ll date men in the future who aren't White, and perhaps I won’t, but either way, it certainly won’t affect my identity as a mixed-race woman.
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. But I also would not insult these people by suggesting that just because I’m part Black, I have a profound understanding of what they went through. 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.
The biggest challenge I think I have felt is how hard I have found it to feel connected to my Jamaican heritage. My Mum’s side of the family all live in the Midlands, and whenever I went up to see them when I was growing up, I stuck out like a sore thumb. They are a big family where everyone was always in and out of each other’s houses, deafening reggae played until the early hours, and they made jokes and references I didn’t get in accents and dialects that I usually struggled to decipher. It was so different to my life in Buckinghamshire, and as a shy, insecure child, I retreated from all of this. I would sit in a corner with a book or go to bed early if I was ever dragged to family parties. This definitely hurt my family - they thought that I was a snob who thought she was too good for them. The reality was I was an anxious little girl who dealt very badly with rejection in social situations, so the moment I thought that I wouldn’t fit in, I distanced myself. As a result, although being part Black is a big part of my identity, I don’t really feel any connection to my Jamaican heritage. In recent years, I’ve made more of an effort to socialise with that side of my family, but I still don’t feel specifically Jamaican.
As I mentioned, I don't really feel I have a great connection to my cultures, but the one area I definitely do is through food. My Mum is an absolutely exceptional chef, and her specialities are Chinese and Caribbean cookery. I was always confused when my friends talked about a greasy Chinese takeaway they’d had for dinner because for me, Chinese food was always a glorious, home-cooked feast! I always found family parties daunting but getting to the buffet and finding the same chicken and rice and peas that I would happily devour at home was a real comfort and showed me that Jamaican culture was part of my life. I haven’t been to Jamaica or China, but I would like to go. The Jamaican side of my family has done several mass trips out to the Caribbean, but my mum has only been to Jamaica once, and I think it would be lovely for us to go together just the two of us and engage with our family history on a more personal, private level.
I think as a nation our understanding of race has developed a lot in the past few years, so it’s natural that my view has changed too. I think when I was younger I talked a lot more about being ‘colour-blind’ and not seeing race as an obstacle. I didn’t really appreciate that the reason I didn’t see race as an obstacle was as a result of my own incredibly fortunate circumstances. Now that I’m older, I have a better understanding of my own privilege and engage more confidently with the complexities of race/class/gender/sexuality etc.
I’m definitely aware that I’m one of the only BAME teachers at my school. I think it’s quite natural for a lot of minorities in professional positions to worry at one point or another that they’re just a box-ticker who was hired to fill a quota, but as I’m getting older I’m becoming a lot more confident in my abilities. I work at an independent boys’ school, and one of the greatest things about this job is being able to have open, honest conversations with an incredibly privileged section of society. We’ve had lots of discussions about prejudice, discrimination, misogyny and harassment. I certainly don’t feel that I have an agenda I’m trying to force on the boys, but I think it’s great to encourage them to think about the experiences that are so different from their own. I remember after talking to my Year 11s quite honestly about catcalling and harassment, one of the boys came up to me at the end and said ‘thank you for telling us that Miss. I honestly had no idea that girls experienced things like that.’ Just getting them to consider these different experiences is something I consider to be a huge achievement.