White Mixed Other

So, race. This is hard for me to write, not like emotionally, just because I have a lot of ideas rolling around so it’s proper loooongtings to get them down. But I shall try.

Kieran asked me the other day if race was even still an issue – if white-on-black racism in this country was even significant any more. I gave him a very longwinded rambly answer that didn’t reveal a lot. And then a few days later, I got onto the subject with the Shepherd’s Bush manager, and that maybe crystallised some of the ideas I’ve been having. Is race a useful way of categorising people? No. Is it still an issue? Yes.

OK so, where I fit into all this is that on forms I tick the box marked White Mixed Other. This does not mean that one of my granddads was a quarter Welsh. Basically, my dad is half-Irish, half-Scots. I divide him up thus because that’s how he describes himself; he does not feel like an Englishman. My mum’s ancestry is a bit more confusing. Basically, she was born in Kenya to a ‘white’ father and a black mother. ‘White’ because his family called themselves Portuguese but had lived between Kenya and the Seychelles for three or four generations – he was white-skinned, at any rate. Granny is, as Molesworth said of Saladin, black as your hat. When Maman was fourteen, they moved to the Seychelles because both her parents had family there. She hated it there. That’s another issue. I will say, though, that it might be a beautiful place in terms of landscape, and the Blairs holidayed there and all that shiz, but pretty much every non-European/-American who lives there is very poor, probably illiterate, and has recourse to only one form of medication should they fall ill (Panadol, since you ask). When I do bring up my background, people usually ask if I’ve been to Africa. I haven’t, because my mum’s family doesn’t live there any more. When I was nine, we stayed in the Seychelles for a month. Maybe at twenty-one, it wouldn’t have affected me as much, but as a nine-year-old it made quite a big impression.

The school I went to was technically Catholic. The population was divided into white kids, usually second- or third-generation Irish, plastics as they say, most of whom vacillated between being English and being Irish depending on the topic of discussion. Then Asian kids, mostly Indian, some Kenyan Indian, who were either Hindu or Sikh but really polite about enduring the occasional half-arsed attempt at Mass or an outburst from the eccentric Fr. George Dangerfield. Then the black kids, of whom more later. Oh, and there were also a handful of Chinese girls in my year, literally five or six. Anyway, although people weren’t really segregated, I once came across two of the Indian girls hotly discussing the fact that although Ciara Hanley said she was Irish, anyone could tell from her dark eyes and dark curly hair that she was Nigerian (more about the pejorative use of the word Nigerian later). So I guess I can’t say that people were really noticeably racist in my year, more that they were just suspicious of each other. Everyone, everyone, of whatever colour, asked me where I was from. This took the form of questions like, “Are you half-caste?” and “Have you got something in you?” I think, at this point, that I was trying to downplay my mother’s colour, for whatever reason.

It’s really confusing for me to try and answer a question about race. At the moment, I go with “My mum’s black” or, if I like the person and trust them not to be an arse, “My mum’s brown”. But it’s not like in the US, Britain hasn’t entirely bought into the notion of hypodescent, so a lot of people will contest the idea that my mum is ‘black’, and I’m forced to say, “Well, she’s not bloody white, is she?” It’s even more awkward because I know what my mum would call herself – she’d call herself coloured, a word that is totally un-PC in the West, and OK in parts of Africa. I can’t stand people using terms like ‘quarter black’. If someone says, “Oh, so you’re a quarter black, yah?” I just want to slap them for calling me a quadroon. (That’s sort of a joke; anyway, there’s something undeniably clunky about the phrasing). I’m half-African. It feels weird to say, but it’s the closest thing to the truth. However, this just means that people will assume my mum is white African and that I’m exaggerating my sympathy with black Africans because I’m a hippy. Interestingly enough, people refuse to believe my mum that she is not Indian (although more on that later). A shopkeeper once spoke to her in Gujarati, to which she responded, “I’m not Indian.” He suspiciously asked her where she was from, and when she said Kenya, he gave a triumphant cry. “Then you speak Gujarati!”

The white kids asked me where I was from because they were suspicious of my fuzzy hair. The black kids asked me in an attempt to bond a bit, or something. They’d usually follow up with, “You’ve never been to Africa? You should go.” I seem to remember that up until GCSE there were lots of black or mixed kids in my year, and that everyone mixed pretty freely with each other, but in sixth form the black kids just sat in the corner of the Common Room and talked amongst themselves. I think this was because most of them hadn’t attended Douay the whole time, and several of them were actually from Nigeria and so related to each other a bit better than to anyone else. The other black/mixed kids had either dropped out (a long with a lot of the white kids), or gone to better colleges (along with most of the Asian kids). Anyway, around the beginning of Year 13, I dropped out. I enrolled again the next year, so I was effectively in the year that had been below me. And they were super nice people. Really lovely. But I started noticing something.

Conor and James were best friends, and had been since they were little kids. Conor was white, James was black. They ribbed each other affectionately about it all the time. James would say, “But Conor, you’re white!” Conor would say, “But James, you’re black!” The only thing that was slightly uncomfortable was when other people in the year would say, “But James, you’re black!” I’m sure he didn’t mind, but it was sort of awkward. And this awkwardness was only underlined when someone did the same thing to Hooch, one of the few other black kids – when they said, “But Hooch, you’re black!” and he just looked at them nonplussed.

Hooch. I feel weird being about to wax lyrical about him, because he’s still, you know, alive and that, so there’s an outside chance that he might read this. But anyway. He was an intellectual. He was also very attractive. He would speak in such an overtly flowery Shakespearian manner, at least to me, that it sometimes got a bit too much. He’d make me listen to bits of Frank Zappa interspersed with Jay-Z, and talk about Leibniz (lot of Zs in that, I’ve just noticed). The funniest thing in the world was watching him switch from talking the way he had been talking with me, to speaking with someone he obviously felt was dumber than him. He’d just say, yeah, yeah, you get me, over and over. Then look at me and I’d crack up. Once I said despairingly that he was turning me into a snob like him, and he said, “Better to be an intelligent snob than an impartial idiot.”

Hooch told me once that most other Africans can’t stand Nigerians (he was Ghanaian). I can say, hand on heart, that most white people can’t stand Nigerians. How do I know? Because they bloody whinge about them all the time. What worries me is that often they are whinging about Africans generally, or about people whose exact provenance they do not know, but as long as they say ‘Nigerians’ it’s kind of OK and socially acceptable. This makes me worry that actually white people do not like Africans, not black people specifically, but that they dislike Africans in the same way that they dislike Poles and Travellers. Ie the racist way (ignorant racism = still racism).

This brings me, I think, to the crux of what I’m getting at. White people unguardedly say racist stuff to me and expect me to be OK with it. When I’m not OK with it, they make out that I’m being oversensitive. When I say that actually my mum is black, they argue with me about what colour my own mother is. I have lost track of the number of indie boys who have daringly enunciated the word ‘nigger’ to me, about someone else, maybe jokingly or just to shock or whatever (which clearly makes it OK). I know a band that was always on the verge of chucking their black bass player because he variously didn’t suit their image, was too funky, etc. Too much riddim, boys? I don’t know. So it’s not like I want to make a big deal of my background, any more than anyone else born in Britain but of strange descent wants to talk about it sometimes, maybe with like-minded similarly mixed people (James, Darren, Jennie). But at the same time, I think white people should start following my Rules of Thumb for Racial Harmony:

1. If you would not say it to a black person, DO NOT SAY IT. The fact that you are saying it to another white person but not to a black person means that you KNOW it is racist.
   
   
2. Don’t say it to me and then get annoyed when I tell you to fuck off.

Just to round this off, I’d like to give some examples of amusing racist hypocrisy in my own family. My Irish granddad was racist, but had extramarital affairs with black women. My African granddad was racist, and married a black woman (who herself hates Indians, and most likely has some Indian ancestry too). His eldest daughter, my Wicked Aunt, travelled to France to visit my Good Aunt. J-F’s father was sent to collect her from the airport. He is a sad porcine man who supports the French National Front, and so it was an uneasy drive back from the airport for him, with his cargo of black Wicked Aunt and half-African, half-Indian kids. What he didn’t realise is that my Wicked Aunt, thanks to my granddad, is totally racist too! She also hates black people! Imagine the bond they could have forged!

Yeah, so. Like I said. Longtings.