Tyler John has joined the team as one of the new Diversity and Inclusion Project Interns. As part of their induction, we’ve asked them to write a blog post about something important to them.
As October brings a celebration of Black History Month, I thought I would use this digital canvas to paint a picture of what Blackness and being ‘Black’ means to me.
Being Black is historically unchartered territory for me, as a white-passing, mixed-race person. My dad is a black man, whose heritage is both white British and Black Caribbean, and my mum is 100% White British. This roughly means that I am 75% White British, and 25% Black Caribbean – as it happens, using percentages to define one’s identity is relatively impossible!
Growing up in a mixed-race family, I have been surrounded by People of Colour my entire life. As a child, being Black meant nothing more to me than having brown or black skin, and as a result, Blackness was something I couldn’t experience or get involved in. Though I have two brothers with the exact same racial makeup as myself, my white skin (compared to their brown skin), alienated me from the identity they were able to share with the rest of my family – they were Black and I was white.
Though I am older and, one could say, wiser now, the importance of visible race is still so pervasive to my understanding of Blackness. How could it not be, when the colour of one’s skin has huge implications for their everyday experience? Black men are consistently the most likely demographic to have a fatal encounter with the police (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019), and black women earn on average 40% less than white men do (Lean In, 2019). The fact is, my white skin means I will never experience these disadvantages, and this is a privilege that cannot be ignored. However, does it make me any less Black?
Yes, and no. Having darker skin is a huge factor in the lived experiences of People of Colour, affecting how you exist and move through the world, and because of the colour of my skin, there are experiences, sentiments and feelings inherent to being Black that I can never share. However, as I have now learned, and as I continue to try and teach myself, being Black is so much more than the colour of one’s skin.
To me, being Black is a multi-dimensional and intersectional experience. It exists in the places we live, the food we eat, the music we listen to, the art we consume, the clothes we wear, the history we have lived through, and ultimately, how we engage with these things. Though I may have been one of the only white-skinned people in my family, I’ve spent enough summers making roti with my Granddad and listening to soca at family parties to understand that being Black doesn’t solely reside in the way we look, but also in the way we live our lives.
This is a continuing journey for me as an adult. At every opportunity, I find myself desperately keen to absorb things outside of the white-centric cultural hegemony and expose myself to things that will not only diversify my understanding of race but too, my understanding of my own racial experience. I am a gay, mixed-race, working-class person, and every day, I discover something new about what this means. Will I ever have a perfect understanding of myself and the things that make me who I am? No, probably not, but I’m so excited to explore as much as I possibly can.