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Honestly feel that ethnicity v race is once again kicking people’s asses
Here’s the deal from an older man: when growing up me and my brother were treated as Black. Back in the 80s there weren’t many mixed race kids and while of course we’d have had more shit if darkskin all the racial abuse / issues at school was about Blackness. Not being mixed.
When I tweet I was “mixed race before it was popular” I’m only half joking numbers have increased exponentially and white Brits pretty much know who is mixed with a white parent and who isn’t.
This is not the USA or Brazil where they had generations of lightskin black people marrying each other to maintain privilege. You meet someone who looks like me, vast majority of the time they usually have a white parent right?
Now flash forward to 2020 and we are having more conversations and ofc the conversation is entirely different it you are a man or a woman, but me walking into a job interview is entirely different to a darkskin person. It is. They’ve done studies on it.
However “you only see Blackness as hardship” for me is nonsense. Blackness =/= ethnicity - I am Afro-Caribbean ethnicity as well as white English. Blackness goes across nationality and ethnicity and connects us across continents as we discuss our experiences and share culture.
What I am not, is white in most contexts. I go abroad to Morocco or Brazil or Cuba and they think I’m local or want to know why a British person looks the way I do. They ask me. There is no such thing as being “half-white” you either are or you aren’t.
With people in the UK, the very recent increase in numbers of people of colour means even now 70 years later skin colour raises questions of our nationality and belonging. There’s a growing notion of “great replacement” and we are part of that.
Here is the UK census form. The question is about ethnicity, not race but there’s some conflation. Nearly all mixed race people will tick an entry in Mixed/multiple ethnic groups. I do.
I wish there was a neat short word for “mixed black Caribbean and white English” that was understood worldwide but there isn’t. What I won’t be doing is claiming just “mixed race” which could be a mixture of any other ethnicity.
This is a good example where they have distinct categories. A “mixed race” categorisation where all ethnicities are thrown together could hide the real issues faced by mixed Black people.
So I am a mixed Black person and that has evolved as society has evolved. But it’s also important to know when a conversation isn’t for you. Like the time I was on a panel and they asked me about intersectional feminism and I literally passed the mic to Black women.
But also, I want mixed black people to talk about the issues affecting them, I read an article where the writer spent five paragraphs apologising for her privilege and then went on to say her white family disowned her and her grandma called her the n-word.
The time to bring that up is for example, NOT when dark skinned Black people are discussing colourism in an “I have suffered to!” Gotcha. But talk about it all the same. This is properly traumatic stuff. (Luckily, I cannot relate)
Friend is Black/south Asian (no white parent) is not light-skinned. She was asked to be on a panel about Black women coming up in her industry. She said she was middle class and recommended dark skinned black women from working class backgrounds. Know when it ain’t for you! FIN
