MIXED MESSAGES
Writer Natalie Morris reflects on belonging, family and the multiplicity of her identity as a mixed-race woman
Your identity is a constellation. Shining points of light in the darkness that, when connected, create a rough outline of who you are. My mixedness is just one of the many lights that make me who I am, but a side-effect of having mixed heritage is that the ability to claim your own identity can slip out of your hands. People tend to project their ideas of who they think you are on to you; they steal your starlight by telling you what you are and what you are not. And the identity that others decide for me doesn’t always correlate with what I see when I look in the mirror, or how I feel about who I am. I am Black Jamaican on my dad’s side and white British on my mum’s. I see them both in my reflection. Their features burst, kaleidoscopic, on to my own wherever the light hits my face. My dad’s never-ending forehead, the off-balance slant of his eyes, the smile that shows every single tooth. As I get older, I see more of my mum. She’s there in the high cheekbones, the bulbous tip of my nose, the way my eyes crinkle to nothing when I laugh. Yet, even as I slowly morph into my mother, there will always be a barrier in how the world perceives our resemblance. There is an acceptance that I can look like my dad – that I can be Black – and tellingly, I have almost always felt welcomed by the Black community. But whiteness is an exclusive club that positions everybody else as ‘other’. Whiteness has never been something I have aspired to. I identify as Black and mixed, but it still stings to know that no matter how close I am with my mum, no matter how much love we have between us, there will always be those who only see difference and division.
In the early 1990s, when my mum would take my little sister and me out in our buggies, people would ask her who those two little girls belonged to, or they would regard her with suspicion, judgement and sometimes open hostility. I don’t remember this, but Mum has told me that she and dad were also yelled at for holding hands in public. We grew up in the leafy suburbs of south Manchester, a diverse, metropolitan city, but these incidents, however infrequent, reveal a picture of Britain that was still inherently uncomfortable with the idea of interracial relationships.
Fast-forward to the late 1990s, at my school there was only ever a handful of other students who weren’t white. Within that group, there might have been one or two with mixed heritage. The first time I was made aware of my ‘otherness’ was when a boy called me ‘chocolate face’ in the playground. I was seven years old and I didn’t understand why the colour of my skin was an insult, but it triggered a deep anger and an even deeper sadness. I responded by pulling out my best Sporty Spice fly kick and landing it right in his stomach. He fell to the ground and I was hauled into the head teacher’s office.
I have only experienced a handful of these overt, unavoidable instances of racism in my life. The most recent was the summer before last, on a long weekend in Paris with a couple of friends. As we were sunning ourselves on the grassy bank outside the Sacré-coeur, eating fresh cherries and an oozy cheese and trying to appear effortlessly French and elegant, a man got far too close to our group in a belligerent attempt to chat us up. As we avoided his eyes and tried to ignore him, he called me a ‘Black bitch’ and the N-word. This time, burying my anger and sadness, I didn’t fly kick anyone, we just packed up our little picnic and left.
But not one of the many people sitting within earshot of this altercation said a single word or even looked up.
Every time something like this has happened, what has mattered to the perpetrator is the fact that I am not white. Not the degree of my Blackness or the fact that I happen to have a white parent. I am simply ‘other’ in their eyes, and being mixed doesn’t provide protection against this. However, in other contexts, my mixedness has been a privilege; a powerful shield against the worst forms of racism, a key that grants entry to spaces where darker-skinned or monoracial minorities – like my Black family members – might be excluded.
My mum’s side of the family is from Staffordshire, and we spent many childhood weekends driving down the M6 to be spoilt by them all. Dad was fostered by a white woman, Audrey, from the age of six months until he joined the RAF at 16. His parents were on the peripheries of his life, but as a result we didn’t grow up with much interaction with the Jamaican side of our heritage. I have felt this loss more keenly as I’ve got older and became aware of a deep longing; a pull to know more about my heritage, my family, where the other side of me comes from.
Dad filled some of this gap for us. He taught us about his favourite Jamaican food and took us to Notting Hill Carnival every year when we were small. However, in recent years, it has been reconnecting with wider family on Dad’s side that has made all the difference. Aunties, uncles, cousins; there’s a sprawling network of people who look unmistakeably related to me all across
Manchester, London, Washington and
Jamaica. Making contact with them and being instantly accepted into their vibrancy and warmth has felt like the missing piece of the puzzle.
A unique element of being mixed is that you will never have the same experiences of race as either of your parents. Even with her best efforts, my mum will never know exactly what it’s like to live as a person of colour, and I can never know the extent of the hostility my dad faced as a dark-skinned Black man living in the UK. He occasionally told me stories of the physical and verbal racial abuse he faced as a child in the 1970s, worlds apart from even the worst racism I have ever experienced.
I have a lighter complexion, looser curls, some Eurocentric features that position me closer to whiteness. It makes me feel both guilty and incredibly sad that these physical markers grant me a palatability that can make it easier for me to exist in majority-white spaces than it would have been for my dad, or the other Black members of my family. Navigating this precarious space between privilege and ‘otherness’ can be complicated, and it feels like the goalposts are always shifting.
A few years ago, while working in a newsroom, my boss asked me to give a talk to a group of diverse teenagers who were visiting from a college in Lewisham. The point was to encourage them to go into journalism and to answer questions about getting into the industry. My boss said he asked me to give the talk because I was ‘young’, but I was 27 at the time and there were plenty of other junior members of staff.
I knew, deep down, that I had been chosen because I wasn’t white. It was the same reason I was picked to speak on internal panels or talk about the company on marketing videos. Journalism is still 94% white, and my bosses liked to wheel me out to represent the practically non-existent diversity of our newsroom. As a Black mixed woman with a middle-class upbringing and education, I ticked that ‘BAME box’ without deviating too far from what my superiors were comfortable with, without being too ‘other’.
Moments like this always create a deep conflict for me. On the one hand, I am resentful and angry at being used to present a palatable version of diversity, but on the other hand, I want to use the opportunities to change things where
I can. Of course, I wanted to encourage that group of teenagers, but I felt like my face was spinning them a lie.
To exist in this liminal space – a space where you are constantly being asked to explain yourself, to justify your existence, to navigate complex contradictions – can be exhausting. But it can also be freeing. An acceptance of your mixed identity, of your bothness, is a powerful statement in a society that is doggedly determined to put everyone into neatly defined boxes and categories that ultimately restrict your potential as an individual.
There is so much joy in my mixedness, in the creation of new traditions and blended cultures and in the sense of belonging across multiple spheres. On Christmas Day this year we had jerk chicken and fried plantain alongside our pigs in blankets and roast potatoes. My identity, the starlight that holds me together, can’t be contained in a single box. There is no singular narrative of the mixed experience, there is no tidily explained story that can adequately sum up our complex, varied and entirely individual identities. So no matter how frequently people may try to tell us what we are not, the heterogeneous nature of the mixed population means that only we have the power to define who we are.
‘MY IDENTITY CANNOT BE CONTAINED IN A SINGLE BOX’