Being Mixed Race in a Binary World
Warning: this post can be triggering, but we felt it important to share it exactly as the author intended it to be read.
It’s very difficult to identify yourself in a society where people make decisions about you based on what you look like.
I am mixed race black and white - a quadroon. But I am distinctly not white.
If I was a horse I’d be a bay.
For the most part of my life I haven’t known how to identify myself. When I was a child, I called myself ‘tan’. I didn’t even know I was part Jamaican until I was 10. Then I had a run-in with a white kid in my primary school. He called me ‘blackie’.
Suddenly, there was a question in my mind about whether I was ‘black’ rather than ‘brown’. In my early years at high school my white friends told me I was ‘not black’. So then I was more comfortable being ‘mixed race’. Until in sixth form, the white kids deemed me black, and the microaggressions that I’d gotten used to being spread out over the years became an everyday occurrence.
I also get the ‘n-word’ being flung around a lot. Non-black kids seem to think they get a free pass at using that word around me, because I’m black, but apparently not ‘properly black’. There’s often been a lot of confusion for me, because everyone else tells me what I am, before I’ve even had the chance figure it out myself. But I also can’t figure it out myself. I hate the racism and the box ticking, but at the same time, it’s easier to let society mould me, rather than having to put the effort into moulding myself.
Having to explain to people every day what you are gets tiring, so I’ve gotten into the habit of just letting people think what they want. To add to that, I’ve felt very isolated. For most of my life I was never very close to any other black people. I didn’t know how to talk about the things that confused me. I never talked to my sister about it, because she seemed to be comfortable with her race - which I later found wasn’t true. I have a good relationship with both my parents, but I never wanted to talk to them about it. I thought it would be too painful for my mum. As for my dad, I learned from a young age that white people just don’t get it, and have kept that assumption up, even now.
The way schools deal with mental health regarding race also doesn’t help. My staff faculties were about 99% white. We get told to ‘report incidents of racism’. But that’s very difficult to do, when the racism is coming from daily microaggressions from your friends. Kids don’t want to report on their friends. And certainly not daily. Both those things alone seem like snitching. And when you do report, white staff don’t tend to know what microaggressions are, or ask things like, “are you sure that was racism?”. Most education on racism is focused around ‘what’ racism is, and the difference between racism and ‘banter’, rather than addressing the issues that start racism. No one goes into institutionalised racism, or the cycle of oppression. In fact most staff don’t know themselves. They boast of some minor one day education on how to deal with racism, but don’t seem to realise that these training courses are often coming from more white people, who don’t understand racism themselves.
Furthermore, no one teaches people to check in with the victims. When it happens, racism is often quickly swept uncomfortably under the rug by my friends. No one ever asks the person receiving the racism if they’re okay, if they feel marginalised, or othered. No one ever pulls anyone aside and gives them consequences for their actions. Trying to address it in any way, feels like dampening the mood, or being oversensitive. And after an awkward pause some ignorant straight white male pipes up with, “It’s all just banter at the end of the day!”. Everyone laughs and you go along with it, even if you’re raging inside. For me, there was a pressure there to defend the entire black community, even though I wasn’t sure if I could measure up. After all, I’m mixed race. I’ve often felt not black enough.
There’s also an issue with therapists within schools. Most UK schools have therapists, but again, they are white. There were times when I would’ve loved to go to a therapist. Someone disconnected from the action, who I could pour everything out to. But there’s first of all a stigma around mental health in general. And secondly, how would I explain any of this to a white therapist? How would I explain that a white boy told me I was laying my edges wrong, and now I don’t feel black enough? Compared to the structures of institutionalised racism, and issues like police brutality, my minor experiences didn’t feel big enough to go to therapy for. So many black people say things like, “I just let it go over my head”. If they could all deal, then so could I. It felt like, if I wasn’t tough enough to deal with microaggressions, then I definitely couldn’t measure up to any standard of what it means to be black.
But after doing some research I learned that I’m definitely not alone. One article by Yvon Guest, a mixed race therapist in Bristol specialising in giving therapy surrounding trauma and resilience really helped me. Not only did I learn more in depth about shadism and colourism in reference to society, mental health and therapy, but also about the variety in experiences people go through. There are a myriad of problems people are experiencing across the country, when it comes to race. Like me, a lot of black and mixed race people feel disconnected from their black heritage. We are either (intentionally or unintentionally) taught to shun either our whiteness or our blackness, rather than embrace both. For those of lighter complexions, there is also survival guilt. In this case, the feeling of guilt about the privileges a lighter complexion gives you, at the expense of others.
We live in a society that is very binary when it comes to race. A lot of people have a standard of what black, mixed, and white looks like. Not only do we seem to forget all the other ethnicities, but we forget that there are a million different shades of black.
From people with the darkest of skin tones, all the way down to those who are white passing.
Facts and figures constantly remind us that black people only make up 3% and mixed race people 2% of the UK’s population, and that that is often a reason why there isn’t much racial diversity within jobs. But I think there’s more of an issue here with stigmas.
Separately, both mental health and race aren’t talked about openly enough, so it’s no surprise that together there’s even less discussion. It’s all very well telling white people they need to talk more about race more. But there still needs to be more discussion within the BAME community.
But again, that’s very difficult to do when race is the source of so much pain within families, due to colonisation, slavery, and the images portrayed about minority ethnicity within Western media. Many of us internalise oppression, but we don’t realise we’re doing it because we’re receiving so much from the outside world. As Yvon Guest says in her article, that is also an assumption within the psychology world. It is of course true that people of colour often need to see therapists of minority races in order to understand their experiences, but there is also a massive assumption that BAME therapists know everything there is to know about race, and that they themselves don’t internalise oppression or use colourism. We also need to be careful about lumping all minority ethnicities together. As well as white people not understanding our experiences, someone who is asian may not understand the experiences of someone who is black and vice versa. Someone who is black may not understand the experiences of someone who is mixed race, and vice versa.
But there is always hope, and people do surprise you. My family has never talked a lot about race on a personal level. But recently, my mum asked me why I identify as black. I was upset that she couldn’t seem to understand how I felt society has categorised me, and that people have always treated me more as a black person than a white person. I even tried telling someone I was mixed race once, and got forcibly told I was black. After we had this discussion though, she wanted to help me, and researched articles by other mixed race people who’d had similar thoughts to me. I’d always thought of my ‘mixed raceness’ as the problem. And that goes for other ethnicities too - so often mental health problems associated with race are spoken of like, “you’re black so you’re at higher risk of mental health problems”. When actually the problem isn’t with ‘mixed raceness’, or ‘blackness’, or ‘asianness’, but with the way the rest of society treats us, and talks about mental health.
However alone you feel, the ‘digital age’ has brought about a lot of help and accessibility. It’s easier than ever to reach out to therapists. There’s chatrooms, blogs, and articles out there whatever your experiences. It won’t necessarily make everything okay immediately, but it definitely helps to combat that isolation element.
Words & photo by Lydia Baggaley (@lydia.baggaley)