Reflections on Racism: on Being Mixed Race, Part 1

These are individual experiences but they are not the fault of any individual, but instead the collective system of racism, grown out of a history of oppression, misrepresentation in dominant media and a failure to deliver a more diverse curriculum in schools.

There are many forms of privilege, many of which I benefit from: class, gender, financial, place of birth, education, but this post reflects only on racial.

Part 1

On being half-Indian (Kenyan-Asian) growing up in small town monocultural Lincolnshire (mid 1980s- 2001)

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  Mostly very positive as I was a very confident 3rd child and had a close group of (all white) friends in a comfortable happy family, good schools, a friendly middle class neighbourhood and a left-wing Government through my teenage years.
  
  


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  Late 1980s. I don’t remember the specific event but I recall the conversations afterwards: My Punjabi Sikh Grandfather made a rare visit up to see us, leaving the relative safety of the multicultural North London neighbourhood where he lived. His turban and his beard: proud symbols of Sikhism made him visually different and on a family walk to feed the ducks, a man shouted abuse out of his window “Go home Paki”.  He didn’t visit again for a long time.
  
  


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  1990. Earliest memory of racism was age 7 when my brother was repeatedly being called “Brownie” in the playground.  I was a proud Girl Guide and assumed that this is what the bully meant, but seeing the discomfort and the way my brother was ignoring him, decided to turn up the volume on my plucky confidence, and got my Brownie Girl Guide gang to chase him off chanting his surname over and over until I was told off, hauled in and made to face the wall.  I don’t remember the “Brownie” slur ever addressed. 
  
  


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  Being called a “paki” by a classmate and trying to return with a racially-motivated insult “chalky” but it fell pretty flat without any of the sting I’d just absorbed. 
  
  


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  At secondary school, lunchtime, corridor, alone.  He was with several other boys in our year.  I remember feeling rather apprehensive as I passed them as I thought one might whistle or say something provocative.  Maybe I fancied one of the group; maybe I thought one fancied me!  Instead, one boy called me “nigger”.  Despite my shock and sadness, my ego suddenly slashed to the tear-stained flood, I could also see that this was laughable, pitiable as he got the wrong racial insult. It exposed his ignorance but also the lack of diversity that my slightly darker skin was seen as black.  Such a tiny moment but never forgotten. My sense of self took a long time to recover.
  
  


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  1990-2000ish. Constantly having to explain that “Yes, I am really from here” and “Yes, this is my home”.  But when the questioner persisted with “but where are your parents from?” I felt I needed to give a long explanation- an education- that my dad is from exotic Lincolnshire and my mum is Indian, born in Kenya. The utter confusion led to me explaining about the immigration from India to East Africa during the British Colonial building of the railway network and then Idi Amin’s expelling of non-Black Ugandans when my mother’s family lived there in the 70s. Did people really not know their history?!
  
  


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  On a train from Manchester, c1998, there was a man smoking and drinking. For some reason, I persuaded my eldest brother to tell him to stop smoking. His aggressive retort: “Go back home to where you came from,” is what I remember most and my brother’s evident fear for the remainder of that journey. Nobody else on that packed carriage said a word as his cigarette smoke wafted and collected in the air. 
  
  


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  As I got older, the world seemed to become more accepting, tolerant and I too broadened my own horizons, living in Leeds, Murcia (Spain), London and then to Mombasa (Kenya). My Indian half seemed to dilute, passing more for white in the more diverse cities where I lived (apart from in Spain where my Indian identity seemed to define me “La Morena” (the dark one) in the eyes of the local Murcianos). From 2001, I began to enjoy white privilege like never before…