When do we celebrate those of us who are mixed-race?

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 6 October, 2021

It’s black history month - a time to celebrate black culture, identity, and heritage. But I feel it doesn’t celebrate me and my culture and heritage, because I am third generation mixed-race.

On Twitter I saw an advert for a podcast promoting Black History Month and the participants were fellow social workers. I looked and thought, 'no one here represents people like me'. Sure, there were white, black, and Asian participants but where was the person of mixed-race heritage? This despite the fact that there are estimated to be more than two million people in the UK who are mixed race.

I don’t for one minute believe we have been deliberately overlooked but, as in wider society, we were not considered. The majority of society sees mixed-race people as black, and indeed some mixed-race people strongly identify as black. But do they do that because they are uncomfortable living in between the racial divide and identifying themselves as mixed-race is too vague, especially when they are most likely going to experience racism from both the black and white parts of society?

Ashley Cole the footballer was once labelled a coconut on Twitter - that he was white on the inside and black on the outside. He was also called 'choc-ice', a racial terms that suggest a black person is trying to act white, a fake. And that was by a fellow black footballer!

Growing up the son of a mixed-race mother with an absent white father, I struggled to establish my identity, who I was and where I belonged. I felt compelled and pressured to belong to one group or another yet shunned by both. I never truly felt excepted as white, as I would be reminded frequently of the colour of my skin, experiencing racial abuse and frequent racial slurs.

I remember being physically attacked at least three times as a child due to the colour of my skin. Once, when I was aged 11, I was out with my niece in her push chair. Due to my older sister marrying a white man and my niece being fourth generation mixed race, her skin gave no indication of her mother’s ethnic background. I was accused by a group of youths of stealing a white baby and attacked, punched and kicked to the ground while I clung on to the push chair till they ran away laughing.

As a child my elder sister wanted to go live with our dad, not because she believed she would be loved more, but that she identified as white. Living with our dad she felt she would be able to pass as white and fit in with her white friends.

Living at home reminded everyone she was not white because her mother was black. She was under so much pressure from society to make a choice and identify as one or the other.

I knew I wasn’t white, but neither was I black. I was not as dark skinned like my mother, but as I got older I tried to establish my identity as being black, making black friends.

But like being white, I never felt truly accepted. I went to the Leeds festival thinking I would find answers and strengthen my identity as being black. I tried goat curry. It was okay, but I would have swapped it for pie and chips. I like a chicken Bhuna and have never eaten a yam, but food does not maketh the man.

I don’t think my Ma had ever even heard of a yam in her entire life. At the festival, I had that familiar sense of feeling a fake, that I was trying to be something I wasn’t. A 'choc-ice', I suppose. 

A black friend once referred to me as a mongrel, a Heinze 57, like the beans with 57 varieties. I don’t think those were his views but that of his first-generation parents, because mixed relationships within some black and Asian communities can be frowned upon, even regarded as taboo.

Society is still trying to define us and categorise us today. Even when applying for a job as a social worker, you are asked if you are mixed-race white/African or white/Asian or white/Caribbean. Then there is a box for ‘other’. I have to tick the ‘other’ box.

My mother never knew her father. She was born in a Yorkshire mining village in 1932 and raised in a white family eating traditional English food such as chips, pies, and Sunday roasts with Yorkshire pudding.

She was never encouraged or given the opportunity to explore her West Indian heritage, never meeting her father, believing the black man visiting the house and giving my Gran money was paying to have his laundry done.

She then married my white father, her second husband. Her first husband who died was also white. She passed on her values and beliefs to us, raising us eating traditional English food, creating our very own cultural history and heritage, that of being mixed-race British, not identifying as black West Indian or white.

It is only in my later years that I stopped searching for the sense of belonging to a racial group and finally accepted and embraced my identity as mixed-race British, a man of colour, a true representation of a multi-cultural Britain, living proof that love is colour blind.

Social workers and other professionals can mistakenly fall into a trap of assuming that a mixed-race child or adult needs or wants to identify as black and explore their cultural identity. But for some people like myself, this cultural heritage is only in our DNA. We want to be represented for who we are - a unique ethnic group in our own right with our own cultural identity which is not the ethnic identities of our parents or grandparents.

We are part of the population but regarded as largely invisible as we walk among them.  

Adam Pagett is a social worker with adults in Bradford