Gemma: Curious Case of the Bark in the Nighttime.
Last month, I called out to Instagram in search of mixed race people — particularly those with Black heritage — to share their stories about mixed identity and how the current wave of BLM has affected them. In this guest post, Gemma writes about the rise of mixed families, odd compliments she’s gotten and a strange incidence of street harassment.
I’m not sure if I've started to feel numb.
Between the BLM movement and the tidal wave of social media content that followed, each new perception-skewing experience makes you question where the line between performative and allyship is actually drawn.
I think I feel something like Reni Eddo-Lodge before she was no longer talking to white people about race.
But this feeling isn’t productive. It’s more like when you start looking into conspiracy theories and end up deep down in the internet’s holes until eventually, everything looks like a conspiracy. Everything starts looking like a result of systemic racism.
Non-black, non-white
Being mixed race in a BLM movement can, in itself, be problematic. Many of us describe the feeling of being neither black nor white and, therefore, lack any concrete racial belonging.
In addition to this, those of us who don’t pass as white will be described as black; those of us who do pass as white have to explain our heritage in a big reveal like a rabbit from a magician’s hat.
And depending on how light your skin is and how European your features, the revelation can be taken as one of two things:
Another string to your bow of beauty like, for instance, when someone tells you that they’re one-eighth Brazillian
You’re suddenly no longer white, but black
To be clear here, beauty is beauty, irrespective of race, and I don’t need to be reassured of this by anyone newly coming round to this fact. What I’m saying is that labelling someone white or black when they’re neither white nor black speaks more of our racial divides than it does of our understanding of how racial mixes work.
Are you black black?
As a light-skinned person, I haven’t had the experiences of a black person. Being lighter-skinned has afforded me things. And this is a fact.
Many non-black people that I meet seem to perceive a difference in my skin colour to their own, but they’re more open to it than they are to a darker equivalent; my skin tone is often treated as aspirational like a tan, not other like an ethnicity.
If you’re not convinced of the pedestal on which mixed heritage is currently placed, think about the volume of mixed-race models used as a symbol of diversity in the beauty and fashion industries. Think about how many of these models are very light-skinned with gorgeous bright blonde hair in afros or pixie cuts, and with striking-coloured eyes that make their ethnicity seem ambiguous. Or think about how mixed race babies are fetishised, almost like they’re a reason to get into an interracial relationship.
Compare it with the number of black models that you see, especially darker-skinned girls, taking centre stage in makeup adverts or in non-urban fashion campaigns. How many mainstream rom-coms can you name with a black female lead? And how about ones where blackness or race are not a major part of the storyline?
“That’s such an interesting mix”
10 years ago, interracial families weren’t an especially visible group. Certainly, when I was younger in the 90s/early noughties, a mixed-race person felt like a symbol of either a forbidden love affair or a complicated history of difference, or at the very least, a family story worth asking about. Whilst these are all sweeping presumptions, I think that their existence made the idea of mixed race-ness very palatable in a society whose arteries pump with ignorance.
The idea of being a mix of two seemingly opposing histories gives mixed race otherness a romanticised sheen. And that feels very uncomfortable.
By opposing histories, I mean in the sense that the English side of my heritage may have profited from the prominent and far-reaching UK slave trade, and the West Indian side of my heritage, whose surname is Munro, were likely slaves in Grenada’s Beausejour Estate plantation run by Dorothea Milne (née Munro).
But irrespective of any of this, I still can’t liken my experiences of discrimination to that of a black person. Not at all. And here’s why. Before reading the following five examples, try to avoid a knee jerk reaction of outrage. They’re a diluted version of the microaggressions (and aggressions) that a black person in the UK might face over their life, and invariably more frequently.
So whilst these things might seem shocking, they’re not. They’re not uncommon and if you’d been there, you, like me, probably wouldn't have said anything.
Described as a coconut, as a compliment
Told that I’m “not a monkey - half-caste girls are actually really pretty”
Assaulted in a bar toilet by someone (a mixed-race woman) who said, “I want the black bitch”
Told as a fact that “mixed-race people are the best of both races”
Evaded unfair dismissal because my more experienced black colleague was scapegoated
The bark in the night time
A couple of weeks ago, I was walking to Boxpark in Wembley when I heard someone start barking. I turned around and saw a group of three 17-(ish) year old girls. One that wasn’t barking asked her friend what she was doing.
“Because that girl’s hair makes her look like a dog,” she explained.
I was surprised by the boldness - especially given her age and the fact that we’re still in the wake of BLM - but it was far from the worst thing that I’ve heard said about my hair. What was surprising was that when I took to Instagram to talk about the experience, the outpouring of support from not only friends but from total strangers was overwhelming.
I felt very seen, which was positive, but I did notice a divide in the responses from my black and mixed-race friends, to those from my white network.
Whilst the former were sympathetic but far from shocked, the latter seemed flabbergasted that something so overt could happen. Many reassured me of how beautiful my hair was. One (white) likened it to an experience she’d had in year 7.
In the UK and even on a platform where we’re in an echo chamber of our own views, there is a divide between our responses to snippet news and our understanding of how these experiences come to be. That post had more engagement than any of the race-themed articles that I’ve written, and that in some way felt significant.
The point of my post I think was to encourage people to take the time to observe what’s happening around them rather than to exclusively reflect on discrimination learned from Instagram posts and non-fiction.
There is, of course, no right response to an account of discrimination. But I’d like to make clear that whilst I appreciate people telling me that my hair is lovely, this is so far from the point that it’s almost exhausting to read. I know that my hair is beautiful. The problem here is not a personal insecurity about having afro hair, but that it’s discriminated against so frequently that I’m getting tired of defending it.
I don’t want to have to graciously thank people for liking my hair as if it’s a new trendy accessory. I also don’t want to have to explain that tying my hair up versus wearing it in an afro is as unremarkable as someone with European straight hair tying theirs in a bobble up versus wearing it in plaits.
So when I say I feel numb, it’s that the paradoxes of the BLM movement are getting a bit much to take through the lens of social media. I think I’m getting tired of noise that seems, very often, inconsequential.
