What is your preferred term for your ethnicity or racial background?

[Jamdown123]

I'm just wondering how people feel about:

People of Colour
Ethnic Minority
Black
Nubian
Coloured (surely a complete no-no, but let us see!)

And for people who have parents or grandparents that are not black?:
Mixed race
Mixed
Bi-racial (I don't really like this so much because it assume two races, when someone might be more)

I am black myself, and I like black, but am conscious it could exclude people who also identify as another ethnicity as well as Black. I have also just used 'African' though I'm Caribbean I consider my blackness to be African in roots. Not all of my Caribbean friends like that of course, because they aren't African Caribbean. I actually don't like 'people of colour' because it suggests, once again, that white isn't a colour as it doesn't really reference white people, when it most definitely is!

Yeah ,

I really like African Caribbean. It completely ignores the white I have in me, which suits me just fine, since I know it got there through no good means. It also tells people something about me. From that description you KNOW I like rice and peas and chicken on a Sunday, for example ;p

But seriously, it means something, you know? I'm happy to take the extra effort to learn if someone is Indian Caribbean. This is since there really are no more indigenous Caribbean people (correct me if wrong).

When it comes to African English, African German, I feel differently because that is somehow less credible or needs qualification more than 'German'.

And, I the context of the UK it is bollocks as plenty of children Borneo Polish people today will be ticking 'white British' or just 'British' in their relevant census, and it makes no sense that my children will be ticking 'Black British' when their family would be 4 generation deep by then?

They do say we need to know how people fair in our country, and this might be along racial lines, so we need to know ethnicity or race to track this. True. However, every census I encourage people to tick white British, because could you imagine how much more investment Peckham, Harlesden, Tottenham would get if they thought more white people lived there?!

born of

I'm not that into Black since everyone seems to be chucked in there if they experience racism. Even people who don't want to be included. It's cringey.

@debbrianna
Sorry to disappoint you but there is no way a Somali, Eritrean and Ethiopian would tick an Asian box or white box, you just made that one up. As I explained earlier in my post they would rather have a box of their own ethnicity than just Black and I’m sure most would tick the closest box which is African and if that’s not available they would tick black British. I know that some would tick-other but NEVER White or Asian as they are fully aware they are not.

@phoenixrosehere
Somali is an ethnicity, as a Somali woman I don’t know a single Somali person that would tick an Asian or white box or define themselves that way, even those born in the UK see themselves first as Somali and British second.

@anxiouscrazymum

POC and BAME make me angry!! What bloody colour am I? BAME!! Might as well be miscellaneous or any other non white!!

POC means "not white".

BAME means "other".

Oh and everyone classed in those groups has the same characteristics......

Somali is an ethnicity, as a Somali woman I don’t know a single Somali person that would tick an Asian or white box or define themselves that way, even those born in the UK see themselves first as Somali and British second.

So there is no way that a person of white or Asian descent could be born in Somalia?

@phoenixrosehere
Somali is an ethnicity, Somalia is the country. White people who have been in Somalia before the war(Italians/British/French) have always kept their own nationality and passport and Indians who lived in the capital city have never taken up the Somali nationality either, they always called themselves Indians even if they were second generation. So no I’ve never met an Asian who said they were Somali for simply being born there. Currently speaking there are no white or Asian people who live there. The current Syrian and the yemen crises have made many refugees to settle there and I’m sure some are having kids there but they would always remain Syrian and Yemeni, no one will take up the nationality of a poor lawless African country even Somali people know their passport is worth nothing.

I refer to myself as Black British - Caribbean.
BAME and POC is such nonsense to me, there's no unity within these communities as many people of other ethnic minorities are more than happy to be racist towards us and have unconscious biases. Black is black whether you're Black African or Black West Indian so that's all I really relate too

Few links. Attached. More about questioning the blackness of somalis which comes up alot. The dialogue is huge on ticktock at tge moment for those for and against.

www.vice.com/en/article/akg59g/somalis-are-black-and-british-too

gal-dem.com/we-need-to-unpack-the-damaging-are-somalis-black-rhetoric/

"As a Somali person living in the UK, it’s a provocation I’ve been exposed to more times than I can count, not just on Clubhouse or even Twitter. It’s a question I grew up hearing in school and it’s also a conversation I’ve tried to unpack on a number of occasions with friends and family"

I say black or mixed race but never white (one white British parent one black British). My partner is white European and one of our children looks mixed race / black and the other looks white, so I wonder if they will choose what to identify as based on their ethnicity (which is the same) or their appearance.

@bowlingalleyblues They should be able to celebrate all of their parts, ideally, shouldn't they?

@WildBactrian

Through my work I've processed hundreds of women from the horn of Africa, and not a single one ever identified as white or Asian. However, I have noticed a tendency particularly among pan-Africans of Caribbean descent to label Somalis as not really African. It's ludicrous, particularly since they zealously claim Egypt and Ethiopia as proud African civilisations. There's too much general ignorance about the continent of Africa from those who've never set foot in it.

If I may say so @WildBactrian , those Caribbeans are speaking from a point of prejudice. Somalis and those from the Horn of Africa, such as Djibouti have a tight culture with the Muslim culture. As such there are many practices that are foreign to the Caribbean community. And although the status quo of the white majority will lump all blacks together, as already discussed, there are as many various cultures as countries in the black diaspora. There is also a degree of prejudice based on religion; Christians were / are taught that Muslims are 'otherly' just as Muslims teach that non Muslims are unclean. This faith division expands the gap of acceptance and understanding even more unfortunately. But I observe that in the struggle for equal rights among young black men and women today across the world, there is an increasing acceptance that religion is secondary to the struggle. To be allowed to live life in all its freedoms and fullness includes being allowed to choose one's faith also.

It's not a pan African ideology. It's a white supremacy/North african separatist embaded in racist ideology by claiming something that is geographically on the african continent to not belong to Africa/Africans. When it has been there thousands of years.

@TeaAddict235#
I know it's down to Islamophobia and the othering of Muslim people. My point is, it makes no sense to single out Somalis for this othering as Muslims are widespread across Africa. They are highly represented in Ethiopia where Muslims and Christians exist for the most part peacefully, having done so for over a thousand years. Muslims are the majority in Egypt and the Nubian populations almost entirely so. Yet both Egypt and Ethiopia are revered in some quarters while Somalia is dismissed as 'not African' by people who've never been to any of those places.

@debbrianna
It is indeed a white European supremacist/separatist ideology, but one which some black activists have unwittingly bought into through their pejorative view of the African continent. They see what they want to see: West African physical features and ancestor worship beliefs. Anything else is 'not really African.'

@TeaAddict235 and @WildBactrian Yes, that’s a bit baffling. There are circa 100 million Nigerian Muslims. Last time I checked, nobody was claiming Nigerians weren’t Black or ‘African’.

I'm following this thread with interest as I am white with mixed race children. As we mercifully live in an area where mixed race families are common they don't refer to it much, but I'll be interested to hear how they describe themselves going forward. I refer to us as a 'mixed race family' for want of knowing a better term! My husband refers to himself by his nationality, as he was born there. It interested me op, what you were saying about people calling themselves 'brown' but I think my dh would be puzzled to hear himself referred to as black, as he would associate that much more with African/Caribbean origins.

@Jamdown123

it makes no sense that my children will be ticking 'Black British' when their family would be 4 generation deep by then?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/31/black-british-1800s-before-windrush

@RedMarauder I didn't see that article but grateful you posted it. The author has described the same background as my post upthread. He is a bit older than I am,
(There seemed to be some doubt as to me having dark skin with a family here for generations from a remark upthread. So the article, is a confirmation of my own identity.)

Yes, to all he says " black fellahs" was the word, ( or "Johnnys" as in "Johnny Foreigner")

I’m a 73-year-old retired university lecturer, born and raised in Liverpool. But I’m black, you see, so my nationality always seems to be under question.

I seem to have even entered into the same kind of employment.

What's interesting in that article also, is that he refers to a place called Tagus Street. I always thought it was Tiger Street until today! That's how it seemed to sound listening to those around me.

It really is a strange feeling reading that account.

Even his experience of Manchester passport control I identify with.
Just before I retired, one lunchtime, the phone rang in my office. The switchboard operator told me that there was a someone on the phone from Manchester airport about a detained student.

On speaking to him, he asked about this woman student, who had all the correct documents, but, HE thought they were false. I confirmed it was one of my students, returning to the following year of her course. We (as in GB)were still in the EC then.

He asked me to describe her, which I did. ( She was a black woman)

To which he replied are you sure? She has a Portuguese passport but is Black?

I told him, that she was indeed, Portuguese, and a real student. Given that she was stuck in a room somewhere at the airport, it didn't seem the time to reveal that her course Head was also black.

@EchoNan you were very professional not to torn a strip off the security officer but I would imagine your priority was getting the ( presumably distressed) student through passport control.

To answer @Jamdown123 and the op. I would describe myself as mixed race as that is what I am. I wonder when my dc are my age what they will say. Moreover, I wonder what the perception of them will be; particularly my eldest as she has skin darker than myself.

I hope that however we all describe ourselves, we are proud of who we are and what we look like- we’re all amazing!

@EchoNan

I think you might be referring to my comment about dark-skinned people in your family as your black family have been here for so long. I actually didn't mean you, I somehow assumed you were obviously brown-skinned, maybe form your posts elsewhere.

I have just noticed that whenever they have people on TV talking about black family from 100+ years ago in the UK, that person is always white now, and most times they are only just realising they had a black foreparent. that makes lots of sense to me. I imagine there were not so many black people here before the mass immigrations of the mid-century that naturally those black people had children with white people, and over time they are now white.

It's happened to large swathes of my family. We still regard them black, but honestly they are white to look at. Ir rather, I should say, we still regard the as Jamaican. Maybe we don't consider them black, because we do say things like 'White Carole', 'White Dennis' when we refer to them to distinguish from, well, Black Dennis!

My family came very early, I think directly after WW2, so in the 40s.

@EchoNan I read the article and it made me think of all the non-white people I've spoken to over the years including a few I still know whose families have been in the UK forever

Then I realised you had posted you were from a same/similar background so I dug out the article when JamDown123 mentioned what would her children tick.

Oh and I've worked with black people from different countries in Europe. In fact I was at secondary school with people whose parents came from another former European colony. (My own last name is European but not British thanks to that. )

I'm just shocked how few British people know that other European countries had Empires so there are black people who are French, Dutch, etc. I mean where did they think all the black footballers and other sports people playing for France, Netherlands, etc come from?

@Jamdown123. Thanks for your response. I did think you meant me, but very glad it was a misunderstanding.

To add a bit more.
The Guardian article, and my own post, was to try to explain to those who don't know our black history too well, that there were a considerable number of black people here in Liverpool prior to WW2. However all were crammed into basically, a very deprived geographical area, and this continued until after the 1980s. Toxteth and environs is still very diverse, compared to, say, north Liverpool.

Liverpool has the oldest black population in the UK, going back to the 1700s. No surprise that being a port, it was built on slavery. It was settled by freed slaves, and also settled by African Sailors ( like the Kru) from Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1800s, and others through the decades onward.

It was a disgraceful thing, back in the day (even when I was young woman), for a white person to marry a black person. It often meant being disinherited. There was a lot of opposition to such marriages, and stigma. Even in the churches. Poor black families, married into other poor black families. Not everyone's family skin colour has lightened over the generations, although many have.

Having said that, there were substantially enough disenfranchised black people still living in the same poor areas in 1981, when the Toxteth Riots were sparked and Toxteth burned.

If they had all been "assumed white" by then, through the generations, they wouldn't have been rioting over racism, lack of jobs and discriminatory housing policies.etc.

This is what it was like for us, a young married couple in 1981. I was still trying to study in the midst of this.

@RedMarauder Sorry I'd just posted the above and saw you had posted!

I'm just shocked how few British people know that other European countries had Empires so there are black people who are French, Dutch, etc. I mean where did they think all the black footballers and other sports people playing for France, Netherlands, etc come from?

Well exactly this! They don't!

I know the internet exists now, but generally people don't seem to want to expand their minds these days. They live in blinkers .

I am shocked how narrow their knowledge seems to be, and I'm speaking as a kid who just lived in the public library and devoured books

Early footballers, Ruud Guillet, ( my age group) Born in Amsterdam! The first that springs to mind, and treated appallingly, but a Dutchman, you are so right Red.

I've talked too much. It's been helpful for me though, as we live outside Liverpool now, so no real chats like this to be had in my present neighbourhood.
This is a great thread, and like all good chats, meanders about taking us here and there. So I'll bow out for now, and go to bed, as it's an early morning booster jab for me! Thanks all, and to @RedMarauder for that article, it meant a lot to me to see it.