English | Jamaican
I identify as mixed-race; my Mother is Jamaican and my Father is White English. One of my Father’s teachers gave him a lot of support and mentoring. She was my Great Aunt, a ‘pre-Windrush’ Jamaican who also worked at Bletchley Park. They remained close, and when her Niece was due to move to London temporarily to work as a nurse, my Father was working in London and was sent by my Great Aunt to meet her.
I knew that my Mum and I were ‘brown’ and that my Dad and my brother were ‘White’, my brother and I have the same parents but his skin is very pale. The only words or expressions I was told that identified me as ‘raced’ were slurs that would apply to Black or to South Asian children. I first heard the N word at playschool at the age of 4, and a variety of other expressions were added as my peers grew. Sometime in primary school – around 6 or 7 perhaps - I began to realise my position was particularly anomalous. The continuous and confusing racist bullying was so difficult to deal with. It seemed to be a universal opinion that I was dirtier and of less value and I learned very early to laugh along or make the jokes first. But it became physical fairly regularly, and the psychological impact was such that it would make me cry at times. I started to realise people determined ones race by a much broader and more complicated set of markers than just skin colour, although it was so confusing, for a very long time I didn’t think my brother was the same ‘race’ as me – he was just White, like my Dad. There may have been some sort of sex difference element to this too, that I was in different categories to him across the board. My awareness of being not White but also not Black, grew throughout school. When I was about 12 we read John Agard’s poem ‘Half-caste’ in English, and this was my first experience of something by/from ‘someone like me’. The expression ‘mixed-race symphony’ has stayed with me since that time. When it was being read in the class I was full of shame about the use of patois and wanted to distance myself from that and from the hot spotlight of the other kids’ mocking amusement. I think this was an attempt by my generally rather good English teacher to be supportive. She followed this with another poem about a man being asked what colour he was when he was trying to rent a room. I recall his being in a phone box. I can’t face googling it because the trauma of the line ‘has worn my bottom Black’ has also stayed with me – telling the boys in particular that under my clothes my skin was not only darker than other girl’s but peculiar, able to be rubbed darker over time, grotesque and mottled. I wanted to tell them maybe that had happened to the man in the poem but it wasn’t what I was like.
I think where I grew up had a fundamental effect on how I identified. If I had grown up in an area where there were any other people of colour I may have found it easier to find something I could claim as me. There may even have been other mixed-race people. I grew up in a rural part of Hampshire near to a large oil refinery. This was a largely working class, very White community and I had no sense of belonging to anything or anyone. My Mother did not speak a lot about Jamaica, at least not that I recall. She, and what I knew of Jamaica from when we visited did not (of course!) in any way align to the vile articulation of blackness that was perpetually thrown at me. Jamaican culture and life were not the same as what ‘Black’ was supposed to be, in the way it was understood by those around me. I had very little sense of Blackness as being anything other than something exotic, dirty and negative and I hated that part of myself. And I wasn’t properly Jamaican, only my Mum was. I couldn’t do or be Jamaican, it was some sort of other state of being that had a fullness and a pride and a lot of positivity around culture and music and food that wasn’t something I could access, or that would recognise or own me. That would be fraudulent for me to try and claim either Jamaican-ness or Blackness and I would be mocked and further despised for presuming. Now in my 40s I have, finally, been able to spend more time with other women of colour and can now see the similarities and the parallels, and the extent to which being my whole self does involve both Blackness and being a second-generation Caribbean immigrant. But I had none of that around me as a child. My Father’s family were all Hampshire people, with strong accents and a long history there. I loved the forest. I wanted to feel at home there. I was born there and have a right to it, it is where I would call home if I could. I’ve never been able to find a way to be there comfortably since I left at 18 and I don’t visit from one year to the next.
I think my Mother’s upbringing was such that she felt she ought to perhaps cleave to her husband’s culture. And she grew up before Independence, learning from the same curriculum as children in England, all about the glories of the British way of life. She always seemed more vivacious than most people around her, and she had a lot more brains and life to her. I got the sense as a child that she felt she ought to tone herself down, but would laugh about it, enjoying who she was. And she had that kind of don’t complain don’t expect just get on with it discipline that Jamaican and Caribbean Mothers seem to bring to the role! She had a strong understanding of how one ought to behave which was grounded in quite an English, C of E set of values I think, or at least that was what she seemed to want to pass on to my brother and me. You would almost have to catch the realness by accident, when she laughed, when she used Jamaican expressions or words, when her accent would come out more strongly. The beautiful cadence of her voice and the way Jamaicans glory in words, in giving words their full expression. I don’t know if there was any deliberate suppression of that side of her and of her accent, if she thought that would be the best thing to do, or if it just happened by osmosis the longer she was here surrounded by Whiteness. My Dad wasn’t all that enamoured of ‘Englishness’ per se. He was frequently enraged by the behaviour of people around us and I think felt generally that his Mother and other war widows had been terribly let down by the establishment. Certainly when I was younger he always seemed on the radical end of the spectrum.
I think they are both people who, for various reasons, had to choose their own values and forge out a life for themselves outside the expected routes that their peers followed. For us as children it seemed as though my dad mainly viewed the differences in their background in terms of class. He would make jokes about her being ‘a colonial’ and the kind of posh expectations he thought she had – almost as though she were part of the governing British over there rather than a Jamaican herself. But I think inside it all delighted him. I would notice him looking at her sometimes when she had let herself go a bit, just delighted in her life force. He loved Jamaica, the food, the weather, the music so much.
I think sadly being mixed-race has been the most significant factor in my mental health and probably most of the choices I have made. I was an irritatingly bright and eager child and was so keen to get out and engage with the world, but my first experience of any other children was this horrendous and unfathomable rejection and nastiness. And that message that I was filthy and shouldn’t exist, like some sort of mongrel, and that there was nothing in me that was loveable or good was pretty constant throughout my childhood and teens. I felt that I had no place anywhere. The racial abuse was severe and took many forms, and I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD as a result. I have been in therapy for years and feel that I have made a lot of progress during the last few years, mainly because of the increasing diversity of voices in social media and slowly but surely in the wider world. Such as yourselves. This, by Alexander Chee, a mixed-race Korean American, really reminded me of how I felt specifically about my mixedness in those years:
“[…] I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing that the person I would become already existed – some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. […] Unspoken in all of this was that I didn’t feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identify – any identity really – was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.”
Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autographical Novel
I live in a more diverse area now (but that’s from a really low bar – I’m in the process of trying to move again!) and initially I felt too embarrassed to try and engage with other people of colour – we didn’t even have that expression then. I moved here in 1992 and at that time I had no real words for what I was and never thought I could be part of any sort of ‘us’. There were so few of ‘us’. I wasn’t Black. Brown meant South Asian. I wasn’t White. I was shy around Black people as though they would say ‘who do you think you are’ for daring to claim kinship with them. I’d bought into the idea of some sort of monolithic ‘Blackness’ that I was completely outside of. So even when I moved away from where I grew up I made White friends and had white partners in the main, I do think primarily because most people around me were still White, but also because that was the culture I knew. I used to see a lot of mixed-race couples and think about their children in prams or in school. I used to think that when they grew up they would be part of a bigger ‘us’ and would perhaps be less traumatised than I was, and able to think and write and do what I was somehow not able to. And this is what has happened. So many voices twenty or so years younger than me, third generation Windrush or others, much surer that I was that they had a rightful place that they could carve out, that they should fight to define themselves – ourselves. And that being of colour in this country is in itself an identity – a broad umbrella - and a form of difference that matters and can unite. It is beyond wonderful to me to be able to use the word ‘us’ and to talk about myself as a woman of colour, one of many. And to feel that my own experience and story and identity is in fact valid, authentic, and is part of a broader narrative of similar stories and backgrounds.
Being mixed-race gives me an intellectual and emotional approach that I value a great deal. Even the PTSD that goes along with it has been a significant driver of excellence in my work – my ability to read a room, to pick up on the nuances of every interaction – this is not unconnected to the hyper-awareness that comes with this condition. I have never been part of any sort of tribe. I have not found ‘my people’. This, while desperately lonely, has meant I am far less impacted by the kind of ‘tribal’ thinking that causes so much difficulty for us as humans. I am genuinely astonished by the stupidity of ‘my country/team right or wrong’. At work after re-organisations I see people who were on one team, and are now on another, seemingly unconsciously shifting their allegiance and worldview from one to the other, creating a new Us and a new Them. I have always been between races, between classes, between urban and rural. I am not part of any of it and have to prove/justify my presence in any space, in any room, in any sphere. The upside of this is that I am equally comfortable/uncomfortable in any of these spaces. The extent to which I can operate successfully, and the way I value people, friends, colleagues, lovers, is based on what they do. How fairly things work. How effectively. I am not going to go along with groupthink because I am part of no group. I am reminded of a passage in Michelle Obama’s book where she describes attending a meeting in a Black Church with Barack after a day of code-switching in a White law firm. How she sank into the familiar, to be being accepted without question. And she noticed how for Barack it was not familiar. He had to win the trust of that audience just as he did with his white colleagues. And that was part of his strength – the ability to win anywhere, because you have never been able to rely on an easy ride. So you don’t need one. And you can see the points of agreement and similarity and interests between the most disparate and diverse and seemingly antagonistic viewpoints. You have lived your life seeking the most obscure connections to yourself, any points of recognition, any second-hand conditional offer of acceptance. My ability to do this in my work as a policy maker is I believe drawn from my mixed-race identity.
If I had the opportunity to be reborn I would only want to come back mixed-race in a different world to the one we live in now. I’m tired. I’d like to be less singular. I’d like to be like a fish in a shoal, unconditionally accepted into a culture that I don’t feel I need to earn. And I’d like there to be somewhere in that world where I’m not a minority, just to see how that feels.