Sick of being told I'm black

[Notjustblackandwhite]

Just this really. On Friday a white friend asked me what I thought of racism in the UK as a black person. I'm mixed race, I'm not black. My mum is white and my father is black Brazilian, but it doesn't seem to matter and I frequently get called black ''for ease'', by white people.

I have nothing against the ''black'' part of my heritage, but I'm at most one or two shades darker than Meghan Markle, and I feel as though an identity is being forced upon me, similarly to how your name might get changed because x and y have decided that your name is too "ethnic" to pronounce. I'm getting more and more worked up over this, and recently someone decided to tell me that I was being racist for being dismissive of being black.

AIBU to think that is really grating and makes me want to punch people sometimes (metaphorically of course)?

What the hell does the USA have to do with it? This isn't politics, this is real life

Not sure if you're referring to me, I get confused with the new quote thingy, but the USA has a lot to do with it

It seems to me that USA history and politcs are being pushed onto European history and politcs. But we are not the same. We do not share the same heritage, history or political system

There is a difference between the history and racial heritage of a black person form Alabama and a black person from Jamaica. A difference between New Orleans and France. Whole different historical systems of law, on marriage, segregation and so on

I'm English and from a very mixed heritage, my Jamaican ancestors are not the same as someone from Americas ancestors. My politcs are not the same as someone from the USA. My identity, my political leanings are not grounded in the USA. I'm European and I resent being lumped in with the USA

The term “black” means someone with African heritage. You can be black and mixed race. However “white” describes fair skin and European ancestry. A half black person with brown skin is not viewed as white in Western society even if one parent is.

Honestly a lot of this always sounds like mixed race people who perceive blackness to be negative so make huge noise to distance themselves. I have many black and mixed race people in my family and no one has any issue owning all sides of their culture but also identifying as black.

Why is everyone here using Meghan Markle as their examples? Regardless of your own skin colour, or mine, she's got nothing to do with it.

No idea. Weird thread.

I understand your irritation, OP.

People should not push you into a box. You are mixed race, you have heritage from both black Brazilian and white backgrounds, so it's mad to insist you are one over the other.

Have you ever listened to Trevor Noah discussing his life growing up in SA? His father was white Swiss, so he is lighter in colour than his other siblings, and he was known as the "white kid".

People look for differences and they should just sod off and remember everyone is part of the human race, give up on categorising us according to skin colour

A person is judged on the colour of their skin or their ethnic background before they have even opened their mouths. It's ignorant to pretend they aren't.

People are oppressed on the basis of their skin colour. It doesn't mean they all identify with the source of their oppression.

It's rather presumptuous to assume that all people of a certain skin colour feel the same about their skin colour. Especially when you bundle together people who don't even have the same skin colour to start with. And not the same cultural background, etc.
Quite frankly, these kinds of assumptions on someone's sense of identity and lived experience are racist.

@NiceGerbil

2020hasbeenbloodyswful

Careful now.

Poster upthread has decided that anyone who says there is still institutional racism in the police is talking bollocks as they have been spending too much time on Twitter.

Utter bollocks.

My husband is a copper and he says it still goes on every single day.

We're human and as long as the issues still exist within society they will still exist in every parameter of our lives.

A policeman with stereotype someone by the colour of their skin, a teacher will secretly dislike children of certain minorities, a doctor will make assumptions based on someone's surname, someone at the housing association will lower someone on a list because of their country of origin.

Opinions don't get changed because someone walks into a workplace or puts on a uniform.

We need to accept this is an issue and begin making steps to change this. Some of the posts on this thread have astounded me.

I'm also mixed race 50/50 and nothing in between! I don't give it much thought but no ones ever asked me a race related question before. I would find it strange if they did.

Me too.

I find a lot of the threads on here around race etc in the last few months really weird.

I mean there's stuff in the news all the time about govt reports and things about the police and race.

It was only a few weeks ago the police had to apologise to a sports woman and her partner after their dodgy behaviour.

And I think another similar one just before that.

The met have an absolute litany of outrageous behaviour around a host of issues. All in the public arena and some of it headline news.

I think it's hard for people to admit there's an issue because it challenges too much stuff. Trust in authorities. Should I do something. What? It's unsettling.

"My husband is a copper and he says it still goes on every single day."

Where are you @2020hasbeenbloodyawful because mine feels things have changed drastically

I mention the met because I'm in London btw- they're my (useless) police force.

A half black person with brown skin is not viewed as white in Western society even if one parent is

Says who?
Ever heard of Alexandre Dumas? Did you know he was (very visibly) mixed race?
Most people don't know that. They just know he was a famous, successful French author. And assume he was white. Because, for the most part, he was treated as such.
So what you say about mixed race people may be true at certain time and in certain places (certainly was in the racist world of american slave owners), but don't assume it's a universal truth, it's just the narrow world you live in.

@NiceGerbil your information source is "the news" 🤷🏽‍♀️

@Kaiserin says my experience in life as a brown skinned person...no one knows what race your mum or dad are walking down the street.

I’m mixed race and dark skinned, the range of skin tones in my family is extraordinary and something I’m very proud of.(Anglo Irish/ west African/Indian - West Indian) Mixed race is a ‘race’ and the beauty is that we get to express our heritages. It kinda sounds like OP is ashamed of her black heritage, which is sad. Embrace it all! I love telling people my ancestory!

@myhobbyisouting

"My husband is a copper and he says it still goes on every single day."

Where are you @2020hasbeenbloodyawful because mine feels things have changed drastically

We're in the North West in a smaller city.

He thinks it's incomparable to how it was pre-pace but still thinks the entire system needs massive reform. He says it's not so much a problem with the post around 2005 officer but the ones before are extremely set in attitudes and ways that are incredibly damaging.

Perhaps it is different in other parts of the country but from some of the stories he tells, not just from our area, it still is very much an issue.

Not that he has been around since Pre-Pace - he's not a dinosaur! But just that from what he has heard and seen (as with his Uncle who was a policeman back then) that it is a different world.

Not just with race but with so many respects. As always though, we could do better. He is the first one to hold his hands up and admit that.

Yes. Govt reports and the news. The news reporting on govt and internal police enquiries, and also on incidents that happen to individual that the BBC etc find newsworthy.

There's also a range of other orgs looking at this eg inquest.

If you're not keen on getting info on there then where on earth would you get it from

If your skin tone is one of colour , then you are a person of colour- be that black, brown mixed or Asian. Black ‘ culture’ is not one thing- black Africans do not have the same culture as Afro Brazilian, and there are differences within Caribbean islands. Knowing both cultures would be beneficial to you understanding that.. however I do agree that ‘mixed race’ is a race and is more recognised as such. Being mixed myself, I never worry about being called black, mixed race, red skinned.. more important things in life to be concerned with.. but then I’m 43 years old, if you’re young it probably feels like a bigger thing.

@Maze76 I'm in no way ashamed about the black part of my heritage. The fact that I keep having to clarify that is making me a little bit sad.

If I was bisexual and people kept telling me I was a lesbian even after correcting them, and if they kept asking me about "lesbian issues" at work, it would piss me off as well. Because that wouldn't describe me as a person. It wouldn't mean that I was in any way ashamed of being attracted to women.

I do not mind getting labelled as black off the cuff or if someone is asking me about my heritage. I mind it though when it's being done out of laziness, because non white people are obviously all the same inside and out from the cradle to the grave.

@raddledoldmisanthropist

But are we really gong to name each person by their skin colour, that would be kind of crazy wouldn't it? And pointless, it wouldn't tell us anything.

Yes. If I need to describe someone that is precisely what I would do. I don't see why it should tell us more about them than their skin colour.

If I can also identify them as part of a particularly distinct ethnic group I might call them South Asian or Orthodox Jewish or Sikh.

And no one saying the OP is black means she is literally black. That would mean large portions of the continent of Africa isn't black.

Black is used routinely as if it does have literal meaning. As if it identifies a group by shared genetics and similar behaviour. This is simply not true and I'm suggesting that those of us who realise it isn't true (plenty seem not to) stop using language in the way racists popularised to describe their ideas. A little more nuance and the racial categories break down.

she is thinking of race as an ethnicity, so she is of mixed ethnicity, Brazilian and British, but race doesn't work on such a simple plan.

Well 'race' works acording to the prejudices of the society defining it, there is no objective meaning.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone use black or white literally. No one is literally black or white, how would that work? And why call people according to a colour at all, unless you are trying to describe what they look like? Which isn't what race is really about.
Black essentially means of African descent, or partly of African descent, and having physical features suggesting someone of African descent. If someone wants to talk about their ethnicity they can say they are Nigerian, or African-American. Of course in some places those people will often be of mixed ethnicity - an African-American most likely has European ancestors as well. Which is part of the reason "black" is a not so useful term.

Well 'race' works acording to the prejudices of the society defining it, there is no objective meaning.

That's rather the reason the OP is having trouble, she's thinking of it as a part of her ethnicity but that's not how others understand it.

Regarding Meghan Markle, it never occurred to me to question her heritage. I only know she has black heritage because the newspapers told me so. She just looks tanned, or Latino, or has enviable olive skin. I don't think the criticism she's attracted has anything to do with race

@Notjustblackandwhite if the colleague’s question was about LGBT discrimination then being lesbian or bisexual you’d be in a position to answer from experience.

I think you need to accept that for whatever reason people see you as black and not take offense as there’s nothing wrong being black. I knew a Turkish woman who considered herself white growing up in Turkey and when moving to Western Europe was surprised to learn she was viewed as a minority or Muslim primarily. Identity can be socially defined or imposed no matter how we see ourselves.

I'm not sure why everyone keeps calling them "American slave owners." For centuries they were actually British slave owners. And all systems of power in Britain were complicit in the slave trade from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries. The royal family, the Bank of England, the Church of England, Parliamentall complicit in the slave trade. And not just those in poweranyone who bought sugar (or rum) for 150 years (or cotton for at least 75): complicit in the slave trade. Hell, even people think of as reformers were complicit. Gladstone, that great Liberal hero, got his wealth from his father's plantations in Jamaica and Guyana, which were so large he got the biggest payout from the Slave Compensation Commission in the 1830s. Read Eric Williams' seminal Capitalism and Slavery. He gets a lot of things wrong (e.g. about the pace of industrialization) but he's not wrong about how the sinews of the slave trade wrapped into every part of British life for nearly two centuries.

This is all beside the point of the post of the OP, who gets to define herself exactly as she wishes and to call anyone who objects a jackass at best, but there does seem to be a really weird abrogation of British responsibility for slavery happening on this thread. We as a nation were deeply complicit. This isn't an American problem. (It's also not just a British problem--cf the French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish, at minimum.) It's a horrific part of our past that we don't get to offload.

@2020hasbeenbloodyawful

But are we really gong to name each person by their skin colour, that would be kind of crazy wouldn't it? And pointless, it wouldn't tell us anything.

Yes, we'll name a person's skin colour whatever they bloody well identify as because it's their identity. It doesn't tell you anything but to them it's their family, it's their upbringing, it's their culture, their food, their struggles, their everything.

It's important and it's time for us to stop pretending it isn't.

The point I was making was that people who are black or white are not in fact named by their skin colour. If we actually called people according to their skin colour people in the same family would be different "races".

While its that case that racism means we need some awareness of race, it's important to understand the concept of race exists for the purpose of discrimination or othering. That's what it's for. Everywhere it exists it's defined in the way that justifies the othering of those who are convenient to have as marginalised or politically disenfranchised. The fact that it creates a situation where it begins to constitute an identity for people who are defined by it is part of it's power over society. What happens when you begin to identify with the construct that defines and justifies your othering?