Does the colour of your skin define who you are?
I've given this question a lot of thought lately I never really believed that my race had impacted much on my life. But as I took the time to reflect, I began to see how the comments and opinions of others has shaped how I see myself and that my heritage had affected some of my early experiences as well as opportunities in later life.
I was born on a cold March morning in 1983. My mom (I grew up in Birmingham where it’s ‘mom’ rather than ‘mum’) was British - blonde hair and blue eyes; she was a secretary and PA in a successful global trading company. My father worked as a theatre technician in a hospital - although he told everyone he met that he was a surgeon. He was also a wife-beater. He was born in Jamaica and came to England in the 70’s. His dad - my grandad - often told the tale that he’d met my grandmother after he'd jumped off a cliff in Jamaica into the sea and resurfaced in Cuba where she was standing on the beach (no swimming involved!). I never met my Cuban nan but I spent a lot of time with my mom's mom as a little girl. My sister was 8 years older than me and we both attended a private girls’ school in a much nicer part of the city than where we lived.
Taming the frizz
As a mixed race female, my relationship with my hair has been pretty torrential ever since I can remember. My mom, bless her, had no experience of dealing with hair like ours - thick, frizzy, matted - so when it grew long enough to be tied back, she’d scrape a wooden paddle brush through it, the wiry bristles dragging along my scalp. The brush would get stuck, yanking my head backwards, to which she’d give me a quick clunk on the head with the brush and shout, “Keep still!” I couldn’t if I tried!!
Fast forward to my teenage years where I discovered hair products and accessories and began to tame my hair using gels and oils and butterfly clips. I copied styles from girls who looked like me - the girl from Usher’s ‘Burn’ video and Mya in her ‘Case of the Ex’ days were my signature do’s. Despite learning to deal with my natural curls, I couldn’t quite embrace them. I wanted to have that straight, slick hair that the popular girls had and in pursuit of it, I experimented with a range of utensils, from steam straighteners to a hot iron that I heated using the hob on the cooker. There was even an attempt to get it looking slick that involved cooking oil. Yep. Actual cooking oil. Another time, I burnt off about half of my hair using a do-it-yourself relaxing treatment, designed for Afro-Caribbean hair.
There was so little knowledge at that time about mixed race hair or the products to use. My phobia of hairdressing salons was born around this time too, after being berated several times because my blow-dry was taking too long and then either charged extra because I’d made the next appointment late or asked to leave the salon with my hair still wet. A kind of shame became attached to my hair that I’ve only recently begun to get over.
Half-N*****r
I don't remember feeling 'different' during my first years at primary school. There were no more than 16 girls in my class and although I was only one of two who weren’t white or Asian - the only mixed race child in the whole school at the time - I never felt like an outsider. When I was about 8 or 9, I realised that I was different from my mom. I wanted to be like her and so every night after my bath, I’d smother myself in talc, hoping that it would permanently turn my skin white. As I began secondary school, the gap between my life and the lives of my peers became hard to ignore. This started with comments and questions about where I lived (a council flat in a deprived area) and complete shock that I didn’t have a dad (we had escaped to a women’s refuge when I was 5 and my mom had rebuilt our lives). Eventually, around the time of the cooking oil incident, something shifted and the colour of my skin became an issue. The girls - my friends - realised I was ‘half caste’ and some started calling me ‘half-n*****r’ as a joke. It’s important to say that I wasn’t a victim of bullying per se; yes, it made me feel uncomfortable and the teachers were aware (I was asked to go on early study leave in year 11 as a solution), but it was always said in an almost affectionate manner. Not that that makes it ok. The use of such a term as a joke by a group of privileged, sheltered teenagers says a lot about the environment I was growing up in.
I left school after my GCSEs and went to a more diverse 6th Form college to do my A-levels, hoping to fit in. It didn’t really work out that way though. I had a group of friends from a mix of backgrounds and ethnicities, but this time, I often found myself branded a 'snob’ or a ‘bounty’ (someone who is ‘brown’ on the outside and ‘white’ on the inside) because I couldn’t speak Patois and had attended a 'posh' school. I was ridiculed by my black friends once for thinking that a plantain was a ‘really big banana’ - I’d never seen one before so how was I supposed to know? Yet again, I couldn’t quite fit into any group.
‘...all them coloureds…’
Back to 1991 and my first time at Villa Park with my nan and older brother. My brother was my mom’s son from before she met my father and was white, although he’d never treated me or my sister differently because we didn’t look like him. We sat in the Trinity Road Stand and from that first whistle, I was captivated. That sense of belonging; thousands of people all singing from the same hymn sheet, literally. It felt like home. And so began my love affair with football, which as an Aston Villa fan, has had as many ups and downs over the years as my relationship with my hair.
My brother and I eventually became season ticket holders in the Holte End which is different from the rest of the stands. It’s lively and loud and less reserved than the other parts of the stadium. It’s for the hardcore, die-hard, swearing, drinking fans who have claret and blue running through their veins. We had a rule: what happened at Villa Park stayed at Villa Park. So I joined in with the chants, including all the swear words. Especially the swear words. It’s an unwritten law for fans to berate the players of the opposition and, despite Villa having several black players, racist comments crept in from nearby fans.
'Black bastard!'
‘Fuck off home!’
‘Get back on your banana boat!’
‘You fucking monkey!’
I let it go over my head. Pretended I hadn't heard. Their words weren’t aimed at me, were they?
Euro 96.
I was 13 years old, watching England v Germany on TV with my nan and brother. It was the semi-final and despite scoring early on, Germany had equalised soon after and the tension was rising. Out of the blue, my little old nan comes out with this chestnut:
‘Look at all them coloureds playing for us. Enoch Powell had the right idea. Send them all back home.’
Wow.
Even as my brother wrestled her out of the room, she didn't see she'd said anything wrong. I was devastated. Did my nan think that about me? My brother tried to comfort me, saying that nan didn’t see the colour of my skin - I was just me. But I wasn’t sure if that made it any better. If my own nan believed people who weren’t white should be ‘sent home,’ then did other people think the same about me? And if England wasn’t my home, then where was it? I was left with so many questions and uncertainty, but nowhere and nobody to talk to about it. I loved my nan, and we continued to have a lovely relationship after this incident, although we never spoke about it.
All these years later, I still love to go to Villa Park with my son and I always feel like I'm home. But also... all these years later, we’re still hearing monkey chants from the terraces at some grounds, with some players being targeted with both words and missiles from the stands. I wonder whether it will ever change.
Shame and resentment
In my late teens, I’d regularly be asked, ‘What are you?’ as people - especially boys - tried to determine my race. I guess I enjoyed the attention back then, plus it was the first time I felt comfortable in my own skin and confident about who I was. I mostly dated mixed race boys, however, I met a man who was white when I was 22 who I ended up marrying. That marriage was riddled with issues that deserve to be addressed at another time, but one of those issues is relevant here. My colour. You see, I LOVED music back then (I still do, to be fair) and I’d built quite a collection of CDs (younger readers - this is what we used to play music on), from Kelly Clarkson to Dru Hill, Il Divo to Good Charlotte. My taste was eclectic. Mariah was my idol but I listened to a lot of garage as well as Eminem who was in his early career. My ex-husband did not want ‘black music’ in our house so he threw my collection of CDs into the wheelie bin and banned me from singing in the house. I know now that this was just another way for him to break me down and strip me of my identity, but it was confusing at the time. He’d tell people, ‘My wife’s black,’ with a tone of shame and resentment that was unmistakable. I remember being confused, like, had he not noticed I wasn't white when he met me? We had two children together. When my son was born, he was a lot paler than me and his older sister; he had blue eyes and hair that looked like it’d been highlighted. People would do a double take as they passed me pushing him in his buggy and a group of moms at my daughter’s primary school confessed that they’d assumed my son was a child I was just looking after. They couldn't believe that someone of my skin-tone could have a child who looked like he did.
If you’ve read this far, then thank you. It’s a lot, I know. I feel like my life has been peppered with moments of shame; times where I’ve questioned who I am and how others perceive me, all because of my race. I could write for days about losing out on a job promotion to an under-qualified white man; or the little girl who’d only ever seen white people in real life and thought I ‘had a tan’; or the woman who asked an old boyfriend why he was 'sleeping with a darkie'; or, more recently, being called a ‘black bitch’ by my husband’s ex. Sometimes, when someone talks about these kinds of experiences, they’re accused of having a chip on their shoulder, or some sort of complex that must be imagined or exaggerated. But that really isn’t the case. My intention here isn’t to elicit sympathy; only to highlight the issues that so many people like me have carried throughout their lives. I know that racism has affected others in far more extreme ways than me; last year, race hate crimes accounted for 70% of police recorded hate crimes in the UK (109,843 offences - GOV.uk). I've never been physically challenged because of my ethnicity, but it has been something that I've worried about happening. I've definitely struggled with my identity during my life, often feeling like I don't know where I belong or how I fit into society, and I think my early challenges certainly contributed to this.
So, does the colour of your skin define who you are? I'm not sure. As I've become older, I have tried hard to embrace who I am in every aspect - in terms of being a woman, a mother, a teacher, a person of mixed heritage. I'd love to find out more about my family background, not to 'find' myself but because I'm curious. I try every day to encourage my kids to be proud of who they are in every sense of the word, giving them opportunities to explore and experiment with who they are and what they identify with. I used to enter a room and search for people who looked like me, often finding I was the only brown person and feeling exposed and vulnerable. Not anymore. I'm proud to be me; my race/colour/heritage - whatever you want to call it - is a part of who I am, but it's one of a multitude of things that makes me wonderfully me.
For information and support around racism, please visit https://www.stophateuk.org/about-hate-crime/racism-in-the-uk/
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