English | St Lucian
I am a half St Lucian, half English, Christian, wife and new mama. Identifying as a Christian is actually more important to me than my ethnicity but being mixed-race has definitely had an impact on certain areas of my life, particularly as a teenager and whilst at University. My Dad is St Lucian and my Mum is English. They were both born and raised in London. My Dad wasn’t proactive in teaching me about his culture and heritage, anything I learned about St Lucia usually came from my Grandad and then later my younger sister and cousins. My sister was quite interested in the history of our family as a whole and would share her findings with me all the time.
My culture didn’t really affect the way I chose my partner but I was always conscious of my children being more obviously mixed than I considered myself to be. Everyone always seems quite surprised to discover that my Dad is Caribbean. In fact my 11-year-old God-son recently confessed that he had thought I was fully White because I’m so fair.
At University being mixed-race became a key component in my degree. I studied social work and actually used my final year dissertation to explore the impact inter-racial adoption can have on the development of ‘Racial Identity’ for children of mixed heritage. As someone who never had to ‘pick a side’, I definitely had a vested interest in the subject and I really enjoyed being able to look at how mixed-race kids have been perceived throughout different times and by different people in society. Plus I got a first so that was great!
Funnily enough it was my White British mum that cooked Caribbean food at home and then taught me too. I think it’s quite sad that learning about the different aspects of my ethnicity wasn’t a priority when I was a child. Now that I have my own mixed-race daughter (St Lucian, English and Ghanaian), I want to make sure that she knows about and embraces her heritage in its entirety which means a bit of research on my part but I think it will super interesting and lots of fun for both of us.