‘I KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT BIRACIAL BRITAIN’

Growing up biracial, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel different. My father is Nigerian and my mother Polish – and in Lagos, where I went to school, and Warsaw, where I moved later, I hardly ever saw myself reflected in the other people around me. Then I moved to Britain six years ago, settling in Sheffield to do a PHD, and finally felt at home.

Things started to sour a bit after the Brexit referendum, and my Nigerian wife was racially abused at a bus stop. The kind of racial prejudice people hadn’t felt able to express in years trickled into the open again.

While researching my book, Biracial Britain,

I spoke to about 100 mixed race people, ranging in age from six to 73. Many told me they felt society had for too long imposed on them an idea of who they should be.

Those of a similar mix to me might be told by white people, “I see you as black”, while black people told them, “to me, you are not black.” They were left wondering who they were meant to be.

Another theme was the messy, contradictory experiences, which didn’t fit neatly into how we discuss racism. Biracial people told me of racism they had suffered from black and brown people, and the sense in some non-white communities that this should not be publicly discussed because it was less important than the big picture of racism by white people against people of colour.

Yet, I also found life was easier for younger biracial people than it had been in the past. One man said his parents had been turned away by a Nottingham restaurant in the late 1990s. Such discrimination would be unimaginable now.

Still, I wasn’t shocked by the Duke of Sussex’s allegations about a family member questioning how dark his baby’s skin would be. Colourism is still with us. This thing we call race is a very messy business.