Giving up trying to be white was the best thing I ever did
Growing up as a mixed-race girl in England, I’ve been afforded many privileges on account of my light skin. I also have the privilege of being pretty by society’s standards, so this, combined with my lighter skin tone, has shielded me from a lot of the experiences that my darker-skinned sisters have had to endure since childhood. In fact, I’ve benefited from it so much so, that I spent my formative years and well into my 20s striving to be white, from the way I speak to the way I dress and even to the friends I mixed with.
What I’m going to write about here, and I hope you stick with me for it, is the way whiteness wrote my life’s narrative for many years, and the damage this did to my own identity and being. The good news though, is that this isn’t a sad story. In the spirit of November 2020, which so far has seen Donald Trump lose the presidency and a possible COVID-19 vaccine hitting the headlines, I will be celebrating a happy ending. So here goes…
I can distinctly remember feeling ‘othered’ from a young age. I grew up in a sleepy village in the English countryside, where besides one black family, we were the only other people of colour around. To be honest, I actually remember thinking how strange it was to see black people at all, not realising that other people may be thinking the same thing of me. My own skin colour didn’t factor in my mind until I was about 10 years old. In the playground, a new kid in class called me a p**i. I’d never heard the term before but knew instinctively that it was intended as a racial slur. I told the teacher on duty and she asked me if I was from Pakistan. “No,” I said. “Well, there’s no problem then, is there?” she countered. I was left with a sense of injustice without being able to articulate why.
I remember going home and looking at myself in the mirror, realising for the first time that I looked different to the other children at my school. I went down to the kitchen and approached my mum.
“Mum, am I black?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“So am I white?”
“Err, no.”
“So, what am I?”
And so began years of racial confusion.
At that point, I realised I’d already experienced a lifetime of discomfort in my own skin but could never before point out why. Growing up in a very white village, with little to no diversity, meant that whiteness as the norm was reinforced with everything we did. We read books about white children (don’t get me started on the racism in the Famous Five), we played with white-skinned dolls, and we were taught about the history of Britain from a very white perspective. Time and time again, I learnt the lesson that whiteness was what we should strive for. It meant normal, it meant beauty, it meant power.
But as much as I enjoyed reading those books and playing with those dolls, I had felt a growing sense of unease. A sense that I didn’t quite belong, that I was a little bit different, and that this wasn’t a good thing.
I therefore tried my hardest to be as white as I possibly could, naively thinking this would grant me acceptance in our inherently racist society. I hated my thick, curly hair which was regularly mocked by children in my class as they (in my mind’s eye) flicked their shiny blonde tresses over their shoulders. I once put my face on an ironing board, laid my hair out and attempted to literally iron it straight. This resulted in broken and damaged curls, burns on my forehead, and the gross smell of singed hair lingering in my bedroom for days. [Please don’t try this at home.]
I worried if too many of my friends at school weren’t white. Honestly, I’m so ashamed now to admit that. But I genuinely used to think if more of my friends were white, that was a good thing as I would pick up white habits and act like a white person.
I also forced myself to listen to music I wasn’t even interested in. My natural tendency was to enjoy listening to RnB and hip hop. As a teenager, my then boyfriend mocked me for it. “Do you think you’re black or something?” I was offended to be categorised that way. So I instead listened to indie rock and screeching American boys who sang about fancying their friend’s mum. Good grief.
Years of acting like this went some way in convincing myself I was white but never dispelled my racial disquiet. Because whilst I pretended I was another Taylor Swift, my brown skin was an obvious signifier that I was, in fact, not.
I’ve regularly been told that as a mixed-race person, I had “the best of both worlds”. It’s something I’ve found myself repeating to many others in a jokey way over the years. Did I ever actually feel like that though? Absolutely not. That perception is a complete myth. Rather than ‘having everything’, you are instead stateless, with an identity constantly up for debate.
My parents always said I was ‘half and half’. 50 per cent white Caucasian, and 50 per cent Mauritian (a melting pot of races in that half alone). Regardless of that 50:50 split, my racial ambiguity and brown skin dictates that society will only ever see me as ‘other’. Yet I have struggled to identify as a person of colour, and definitely struggled with my African heritage.
In the past, I was quick to say I was mixed race, or half English, or even just light brown. Why did I want to distance myself so much from people with darker skin? Why was I offended to be grouped together with black people? Years of inward inspection and challenging conversations have made me realise I was guilty of blatant racism and colourism myself. White supremacy has taught me over and over that I’m not as good as white people, but I can be better than black people, so whilst I’m not at the top of the race pyramid, at least I don’t have to be at the bottom.
With this realisation has come a passionate dedication to unpicking and unlearning my racist biases. Only in my late 20s did I become far more open to fully embracing my ethnicity. Literally within the last few months, my sister and I had a conversation about our heritage, and we were blown away by the fact we could identify as African. It seemed such an alien concept to us, but why is that? We are half English, and half Mauritian. That’ll be the Mauritius situated in Africa. We’ve been this mix our whole lives. And yet…not once before this year did we ever consider ourselves to have links to the continent.
And then came the next challenge. Would identifying that way fail to address the undeniable privilege my lighter skin has afforded me? I’ve faced years of internal anguish and racial micro-aggressions, including in my own family, but I will never know the lived reality of being dark-skinned.
As a mixed-race person, I’m still unsure of where I stand in the conversation of race. On 25th May 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in broad daylight and with an audience, prompting one of the world’s largest social movements in modern history. The struggle for racial justice suddenly had the world’s full attention, and people flocked to the streets to protest. After weeks of this, I found myself unpicking the events and realising they’d triggered deep emotions from my past. I felt so much suppressed pain and rage radiating off me like heat waves. I was so fucking angry all the time. I couldn’t stop thinking over all the micro — and not so micro — aggressions I’ve faced over the years. I then felt shame for having these thoughts as they didn’t compare to what darker-skinned black people have had to live through. Why on earth was I using this time for ‘woe is me’?
I threw myself into anti-racism work. But by speaking out against racism at work with presentations on Black Lives Matter or participating in panel discussions, was I taking space away from black people? Did I count as one or was I in the way?
As a mixed-race woman, I’m aware I represent a safe space for white people, as well as black people I know, to have frank discussions about race. I can access both sides of the argument in the conversation about race first-hand, but I also regularly find myself in an identity limbo, not quite fitting the spec for either camp.
What I’m coming to accept is that despite — scratch that, because of — my privilege as a lighter skinned person, this is still my conversation to have as much as anyone else. I can use my privilege to have that conversation in other places where they may not usually take place.
It’s resulted in difficult conversations with friends, colleagues, and even family. This summer saw one of the rockiest patches for our family in a long time. It’s difficult to understand just how subtle but pervasive racism is in the UK unless you’ve experienced it for yourself, and so my white family members have had a tough time being able to relate to the emotional rollercoaster myself and my siblings have been riding.
I don’t think it comes naturally to our white parents to see us through the prejudiced eyes of the world, or to teach us how we will be seen, the way black parents will do for their black kids. The term ‘colour blind’ gets bandied about as they love us and care for us in every way they know how to, but this does not protect us from the harsh realities of the world. They cannot protect us from society’s intolerances or establish communities for us to belong to where they themselves do not exist. They cannot walk a mile in our shoes nor ever know our lived experiences.
This just means we must continue having these conversations. Don’t let them be a single moment in time, but something that gets embedded into our way of life, to begin stripping away the restrictions that white supremacy has built around us. Now that my eyes have been opened to my own biases and how they’ve impacted the way I live my life, I cannot ever go back to the way I was before. I will never return to choosing whiteness over everything else.
That old way of living has left huge gaps in my knowledge of my cultures. I didn’t know anywhere near as much about the food, music, clothing, or language as I’d like to. In my childhood, I wanted to minimise my cultural heritage and not draw attention to the fact that I was different. But as an adult, I’m desperately trying to rediscover my missing identity. There is so much richness to my heritage, so much to revive, I am beyond excited.
The global pandemic and months of lockdown has completely reshaped our lives. It’s allowed me the time to figure out who I am. It’s been a bewildering and exhausting journey, subject to an endless stream of mixed messages, but one I am so happy to have undergone. The racial self-hate I’ve carried was a painful thing to fully come to terms with. I’m nowhere near done yet with unlearning all those negative racial messages poured into me as a child, and continue to navigate as an adult in a world that still sees whiteness as best. What I do know is that finally giving up trying to be white was the best thing I’ve ever done.
