British | Ghanaian
My mother is English, born in South East London. My father was West African, an Ewe. He was born in Saltpond in what was then the British Colony of the Gold Coast and is now Ghana. They married in 1957, in a registry office because the Church would not condone an African man marrying an English woman. Both of their families also opposed the marriage and only two friends attended their wedding as witnesses. As a mixed-race couple in the late 1950s in London, my parents had great difficulty finding somewhere to live. No one would let rooms to them and since both Black people and women were discriminated against they could not get a mortgage to buy property. I grew up in South East London in the 60s and 70s. The Race Relations Act was passed just three years after I was born but race relations in the U.K. were still very strained. I do think that there are still biased attitudes and stereotypes towards mixed-race people. When I explain my racial heritage I often get asked if I’ve been ‘Home’, as if this country is not my home. I am asked this both by White people and by Black people. Funnily enough people from the Asian Sub-continent or the Far East rarely ask. Those who are mixed-race themselves are often curious but generally have more subtle ways of enquiring. Also, although my children are now in their twenties, I do think that there is still an assumption in 21st century Britain, that mixed race children are from ‘broken homes’, i.e. that mixed relationships do not endure. My parents were married for 54 years before my father’s death. I have been married 34. If I were to be born again, if forced to choose, in terms of race I should probably choose to be White (I do think life in the U.K. is still easier for White people). But I adored my father and cannot imagine not being his daughter, so I would choose to remain mixed-race, to remain Me. We will eventually all be mixed-race, and the questions currently asked on diversity forms will become irrelevant because it will become too complicated to find a way to describe any individual’s racial identity.
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