I was once told by a member of the Nation of Islam that, as a mixed-race person, I was the embodiment of plantation master-slave rape. It wasn’t that I was a bad person, he assured me. It just meant that I was perceived by the brethren as subversive — I was the embodiment of treachery, indiscretion and white, male oppression.
As a mixed-race person, my skin tone has been a constant source of debate, derision and scorn in some sectors of the black community. People of mixed race are often perceived as dispossessed, disadvantaged, sell-outs, suspended in a cultural no man’s land.
Being mixed race means that the validity of your blackness — and your subsequent right to classify yourself as black — is questionable.
A journalist once asked me, rather aggressively, on live television whether I’d found that being half-white had helped my career in any way, which I felt implied that my light skin was the only reason I had enjoyed any success in life. (I pointed out that he was the one with his own show, and he was much darker than me.)
The deep-seated antagonism and prejudice caused by skin tone is steeped in the legacy of colonialism, where light-skinned people (often the offspring of the slave master) sat at the ”master’s table” and enjoyed preferential treatment compared with that of other slaves. Echoes of this sentiment were heard in the United States last year, when Harry Belafonte attacked Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. ”In the days of slavery,” he said, ”you got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master … When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.”
So, even in the 21st century, the legacy of slavery dictates how black people define themselves relative to one another. Community activist and journalist Linda Bellos speaks of the divisive language and attitude of colonialism: ”The importance placed upon skin gradation culminated in the introduction [by the white establishment] of terms like ‘mulatto’, ‘high yellow’, ‘high red’. It also meant they could maintain power even after emancipation and independence.”
Even today, the quest for a lighter tone among darker-skinned women has led to an increase in skin cancer, following prolonged use of skin-bleaching creams that are still available in Europe and parts of Africa.
Are mixed-race people somehow seen as a threat to black solidarity? Like fear and insecurity, racism is part of the human condition, so why should we, as black people, be immune to it? Perhaps the notion of solidarity has been the hallmark of our survival for so long that to admit the existence of discrimination within our own community is tantamount to an admission of weakness to the white community.
Black and mixed-race people are united by virtue of being a minority who are discriminated against — but our heritages, experiences and, more significantly, our skin tones are as diverse and varied as your average Europeans. Whereas some white people simply see the colour ”black” as the defining physical characteristic of a person, regardless of features, skin tone, sometimes gender (I have been likened to such disparate people as Whoopi Goldberg, Tiger Woods and Tracy Chapman), black people see degrees of blackness — and, in some cases, the wrong shade of black.
I once edited a lifestyle magazine for black women. Almost immediately after my appointment, I received hate mail from black women who had seen my picture inside the cover. I was called a ”red-skin bitch”, a ”black-hating whore”, a ”milk-faced cunt”. I left the job three months later after seeing a television sketch based on our magazine. The black actress impersonating me had white powder daubed on her face and talked in a posh accent about having gone to Brixton (in south London) for the first time, where they sell skin bleach. She considered getting blonde hair extensions: ”Then no one will ever know I was black in the first place!”
I felt sick, hated and ridiculed. It was a horrific experience. Being mixed race can mean that you have access to all areas, by virtue of having a white parent; on the other hand, you don’t feel totally accepted by either the black or the white community. More significantly, you can’t count on support from the community with which you are associated, rightly or wrongly, by the majority of the white establishment: the black community — this big, happy group, bonded by unshakeable solidarity.
Skin gradation and tone appear to have played a less significant role in the African-American approach to black cultural identity than they have in Britain. (There are 50-million of them, and theirs is a much more established culture.) According to the film director Spike Lee: ”One drop of African blood makes you black in the States. Sure, there are vestiges of slavery, where straighter hair and light eyes were considered to be more beautiful than Negroid features, but we’ve gone beyond that.”
So, will we, as black Britons, ever see a time when mixed-race people are given the black community’s full support? After all, if we were to stand in front of a crowd of National Front supporters, their hatred would hardly be curbed by the fact that we’re a ”lighter” tone of non-white. Will we ever be able to take joy in our brethren’s success without accusing them of ”selling out” or ”dancing to the white man’s tune”?
According to a Policy Studies Institute report in the late 1990s, 40% of black children of Caribbean origin in the United Kingdom have one white parent. Half of all British-born black men and a third of British-born black women have a white partner: the mixed-race population, at least in our cities, is set to grow. Will they eventually be assimilated into the black community or will they have to form their own ethnic group?
The truth of the matter is that, as long as sections of the white establishment continue to leave us out of the decision-making process, and as long as there are only three black members of Parliament in Britain’s House of Commons, as long as 16% of the prison population is made up of black people (when, in the 2001 census, they made up 2,2% of the population of England and Wales), and as long as black and Asian people are disproportionately represented among the nation’s poor — how can I expect anything less than fragmentation and hostility? — Â