On Being Black and British
Nigger means friend. Nigger means slave. Slave connotes subservience. It’s a salute to whiteness — Cecil Rhodes, Jim Crow Laws and the coded language of White supremacy.
“Nigger” has become a corrupted allegory for friend, Americanised in an attempt to reclaim it. It’s undergone what academics would call amelioration, when a word or phrase that was once negative has become positive over time. You hear friends calling each other nigger (or nigga / nibba). “What’s up, nigga?” they say. “Nigger” was the planters drawing a thick red line between them and their slaves. It was a line between the rulers and the ruled, the coloniser and the colonised, the powerful and the powerless. When people say “nigger”to me, are they calling me subhuman? Are they calling me slave? Am I property? Am I colonised too? The play things of history. Have a think.
As a Black person, as a Black Briton, I am consistently asked where I am from. If I say “Northampton”, they will call me a liar. If I say I come from Liverpool or Bristol, they will call me a liar. If I tell them I was born in Rochdale (Lancashire), around empty bellies, hard hands and cotton mills, they will call me a liar. They will go on to ask me where my parents are from, I will say Britain. They will call me a liar once again.
When they learn both my parents are British, they will interrogate further. They will not believe that my mother is a born-and-bred Northamptonian and my father is a pure-blooded Brummie. They will learn that I am a child of the British Empire, my mother’s side from of Grenada — French and English dialects smacking against the inner walls of my mouth. Spice, sunshine and baseline in the haze Maurice Bishop and Uncle Sam’s fist. They will learn my father’s family comes from the Big Island (or so they called it), Jamaica — roots, rocks and rebellion — slavery as blood sports — Sam Sharp, Nanny (or Nana), the Maroons, curry goat and ackee and saltfish — sounds systems and parties going on back-a-bush!
And at some point in our lives, one, or many confident White people will try to parade their knowledge of my culture on me like they own it. Well, they kind of do. Their people are as much part of West Indian history as I am. It’s a shared history. My English was given to me at the end of a sword. French was given to me at the end of sword. They took our language and even took our names. Ventour and Griffiths are not my names. They’re the names my ancestors were given by master. Slave names. And they’re all I have.
For me, my race / ethnicity is one of the few parts of my identity that was concrete from birth. It can’t be changed. I am what my parents are. Black. And I am now asking the questions that most ethnic minorities have asked. “Who am I? Where am I from?” For people of colour, the quest for identity is a road of loneliness. For each person, the motivation for this quest is different. And to find the answers takes as long or as a short a time as it needs to.
At school and at university, I found myself at odds with being taught about race / racism and slavery by White lecturers. Am I prejudiced for having qualms with something that is beyond my teacher’s control? Being taught these things by people who look like those who colonised my ancestors? Systems of oppression by White design. In the UK, there’s nothing any White person could tell me about race that didn’t come from a book. You can only learn so much by reading. Some things have to be lived through experience.
How about those born from the union of Black and White parents? Those who are dual-heritage. My cousins look racially different. Not White or Black. They are both, born into light-skin privilege, as they will grow to learn. But when they go out into the world, they may be called nigger like I was. Not as friend — but as foreigner, as interloper, as immigrant. They may be called half-caste. They may be called Oreo: someone who is black on the outside and white on the inside. I pray they never have to see Britain rear its ugly head as I did, as their father did, as our grandparents did, who came here for a better life.
This is not a guide on how to be dual-heritage. This is a guide on how to be a person of colour in a country that has a history of oppression and racial intolerance. All these words are coded language for nigger. For slave. For our ancestors, who were lynched, hanging from trees. But they are half-white too. Do they flap or watch? Do they say “yes master” or “no master?”
They might spend their teenage years and even the following decade trying to figure out their role or place in all this. Or they might not. They might feel comfortable in their skin. They may never experience racism at all. I hope to God that they live that life. However, they could be brainwashed into thinking in this language called Labels. They could be tricked into believing that “I don’t see race” mentality. Everyone sees race. And there’ll come a day when they might be called nigger. What will they do if that day comes? Indeed, what will they do?
One day I was told “you’re good-looking (for a Black boy). I didn’t know how racist that was until I went to college where there were other Black people. In that moment, I thought the person was calling me good-looking. What she was actually saying was Black people are unattractive. They may have similar experiences. It may be at a party with the other White kids. It may be listening to a rap lyric and then the word nigger is said. They start to question whether they are allowed to say it in the context of the song. It may be in a history lesson when the topic of genealogy is approached. Their mother’s English origins pit against their father’s West Indian history? Do they relate more to Prince Eric and Ariel or Kunte Kinte and Miss July? Or would they rather Prince Eric have James Earl Jones and Viola Davis as parents?
Their African locks are a solar flare on a deserted island saying come and get me. They are growing up under the wing of their White mother and her siblings. Their father is their connection to their other side. Every so often they will visit their other family, their Black family. Their mother combing their hair epitomises the Black struggle — chaotic and broken, lost in the land that her people took. She is not on trial for the sins of her ancestors but the skin she was born in is symbolic of those ships that arrived all those years ago.
They will watch television and see Thandie Newton. She is like them. They will see David Olusoga, a historian who looks like me but he was born like them. They will see Bob Marley whose father was White. They will see Halle Berry. They will see Barack Obama. What is this mixed-race magic they’ve inherited? What is the secret to success as a person of colour? Yet, when these people go out into the world, they’re racialised as Black, as they will be.
For as long as Black people have been part of the Western world, our collective role has been that of the entertainer — from being on exhibition in Victorian human zoos to being the comic relief in the films of Old Hollywood, limiting us to White stereotypes of Black people: the thug, the prostitute, the funny man, the fresh-off-the-boat minister, the slave… the nigger. There is much to be learnt by observing our “primitive” ways.
Growing up Black is: not the colour but the contents of the characters that keep you reading a novel. Growing up Black is watching Sidney Poitier and David Oyelowo oozing nobility. Growing up Black is being told to shut up about Slavery, whilst being judged for not watching the Queen’s Speech.
Black is Black and the narrative of those who were raised by both is part of this story. Do I, as a Black Briton of Caribbean descent tick the Black British box? Where am I from? Or do I tick Black Other? Whilst being Black can be a shared experience, not all Black experiences are shared. In our family, we celebrate our West Indian ancestry through food, music and told tales. The stories of the Windrush, of pioneers like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Walter Tull, and Mary Prince and Mary Seacole, and my great-grandparents who left the Caribbean in hope of making a better life for the next generation.
When it comes to the modern experience, sometimes the shared narrative is as basic as being a confused kid who doesn’t know where they fit in. Because the truth is: there is no right way to be Black. There is no singular way to be of colour. No universal experience that every person with different coloured skin shares. No stereotype that can show the vast number of characters, histories and ethnic backgrounds that you, I and the millions of ethnic minority families possess. And though, help them I can, I can’t tell them what to do or how to feel, more so when they both grow into adolescent outsiders.
Those before you got through it, under the whip hand of Enoch Powell, wading through rivers of blood on Brixton Road in the blur of Babylon. The world we’re in now is not the same one our parents came of age in.
