Afua Hirsch on race and identity in 2018

There is a tendency in polite places such as Wimbledon for well-meaning people to say they ‘do not see race at all’. But in my case, being taught not to see race only heightened my sensitivity to the extent of my difference. I didn’t find race, race found me. In the playground, in the classroom, on the street, in the shops. I already knew that I looked different (kids work that out for themselves) but that there was something bad about my difference, that there was something inherently undesirable about being black — that, I had to be taught.

From the age of seven to the age of 18, I went to the same school where I was one of a minuscule number of children with brown skin. In primary school, my classmates’ favourite name for me was ‘troll’ — which, in the 1980s, the days before social media, high-budget Dreamworks movies or Justin Timberlake songs, described unglamorous little plastic key-ring toys with gravity-defying hair.

By the end of my childhood I’d learned that black people were ugly. It took a few more years to learn that we were criminals, too. Visiting my best friend at work at a boutique in Wimbledon Village, the manager told her I could not come in. ‘It’s off-putting to the other customers,’ she said, ‘and the black girls are thieves.’ It was almost two more decades until I had the confidence to shop in the Village boutiques after that experience, and to this day I still find it requires psyching myself up. On the rare occasions I do go inside, I keep my hands visible at all times, to avoid even the possibility of suspicion.

I am not a victim. In a society where disadvantage is primarily structured along class lines, I have benefited unquantifiably from privilege. Sharing these stories, reminding my neighbours in Wimbledon — where I still live and am raising my own daughter now, a little black girl about to embark on her own journey — is not an easy, or comfortable, thing to do.

And of course things have changed. Many more people look like me growing up in cities like London now, and contrary to what some people seem to believe, in the countryside, too — the product of the finding that the number of interracial relationships here in Britain is 10 times the European average, according to one study. It’s rare now for people to use offensive language, like ‘coloured’ or ‘half-caste’, although it still happens occasionally. And where as a child I longed for the normality of seeing a physical resemblance in others, now images of mixed-race people are everywhere. The trademark look; curly hair, brown skin, features that are a touch exotic but not so different as to be threatening to the mainstream, is used to sell sofas, house insurance, gym memberships and mobile phones. It’s as if we have become the new, acceptable face of blackness. Politicians have become fond of citing the numbers of our ranks as evidence that Britain is becoming a country where racial prejudice is consigned to the past.

But that is far too simplistic. The growing number of mixed-race people in Britain does not, on its own, solve any of the problems we face; it simply increases the number of people affected. People with black heritage as part of their mixed-race background in particular lack what academics call ‘ethnic options’ — they are condemned to some of the same prejudices as the rest of the black community, along with the bittersweet experience of seeing their image promoted, where others in that community are not. It’s a complex phenomenon, one that warrants a degree of care.

Just at the moment in history when the social change around us calls out for a new level of sophistication, we are regressing, it seems, into crude generalisations and assumptions. We throw around new words and create meaningless identities instead of real ones: I am BAME now (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), as if that’s what I see when I look in the mirror. I have even been asked how I feel about things as ‘a diverse person’, as if diversity is something one can be.

The reason for all this is a desire to congratulate ourselves on having left the past behind without either acknowledging or understanding it, something that any student of history knows is logically impossible. More people are refusing to accept this, and that gives me hope. Some, feeling cast out of Britishness, simply call themselves ‘Afro-Saxon’. Others, seeing images of mixed-race people exploited while other forms of blackness are shunned, monitor shadism on social media in real time. These words didn’t exist when I was growing up, or if they did I didn’t know them.

The reason I write about these things is simple: it is what would have helped the younger me make sense of it all. We have tied ourselves in knots trying to become a post-racial society, without ever having acknowledged the extent to which all of our identities come from a racialised past. We have to do the work of becoming literate in this struggle, so that in the future, we really can move on.

Photographs by Jonny Cochrane Styled by Eniola Dare