The Mixed Bag of Being Mixed Race

When we were small, people always assumed my sister and I were adopted. At the time, I couldn’t understand it, but looking back, I can see it wasn’t a difficult mistake to make. We look very little like our parents. Our father has all the traces of his Scottish origins (pale, freckled, and ginger), while our mother sports the toffee skin and dark hair of her Indian parents. We came out a curious mix of the two, neither white nor brown, our features a pick-and-mix of each country. At parents' evening, when teachers and fellow students saw the four of us together, few could hide their surprise that we were blood relations. This sense of disjointedness, the clashing of multiple identities, is part of everyday life for a mixed-race family. The experience can be an incredibly enriching one — two cultures mean two sets of holidays, the fusion of two cuisines, and the chance to partake in traditions others haven’t heard of. But the middle space occupied by a mixed-race child can at times be intensely lonely. As the bridge between two disparate cultures, there is always the nagging worry you belong to neither. 

Our parents met in the ‘90s, and their marriage years later brought together two remarkably different families. My father comes from a stock of born-and-bred Geordies, and his childhood was a quintessentially British one. He describes trips to Butlins, building go-karts with friends, and celebrating Royal Jubilees through street parties as depicted in The Crown. My mother’s parents came to England after the partition of India and were welcomed to their colonial ‘Motherland’ by the now infamous declaration, “No Coloureds, No Dogs, No Irish.” Of course, my mother’s own childhood was not entirely bleak, but neither was it the Blytonesque idyll that was my father’s. Her family looked, dressed, and ate differently to those around them, and they were treated, or mistreated, accordingly. Forty years on, and I find it almost impossible to align these two experiences, both so vastly different but ultimately resulting in the same two products: my sister and myself.

This sense of disjointedness is still palpable in interactions between my two grandmothers, both so inherently unalike. One wears M&S pantsuits, the other a dupatta and baggy silk trousers which an untrained eye may mistake for pyjamas. They chat in their mixture of Geordie and Urdu-flavoured English, united by a love for their granddaughters that transcends their differences. It feels both a privilege and a burden to be what brings these two cultures together. At birthday parties and New Year celebrations, I get to witness their unlikely uniting when stories are swapped and experiences shared. Yet, at times, this watching from the side-lines can become deeply isolating. My sister and I share only snippets of traditions that our parents can enjoy in full, and our dual upbringing often feels like a watering down of identities to which we can never fully belong.

Conversations with mixed-race friends tell me my experience is not a unique one. Feelings of displacement are common, as is a sense of difference from other family members. Every mixed-race child can recall a clash of cultures in which they were caught — whether it be a cousin who could not understand a particular dietary requirement or an aunt frustrated that you cannot speak a word of their mother tongue. Nor is there much, if any, coverage of mixed-race experiences in the media. Though representation in general has seen a marked increase in recent years, there is still a gap in depictions of this cultural liminality. Growing up, my sister and I had few role models we could look to on television, no mixed-race protagonists that romped through the pages of our bedtime reading. The best we had was our shared experience, a source of great comfort when the gap between our families seemed overwhelmingly large. Yet loneliness does not have to be the ultimate takeaway here, and it should in no way overshadow the joys of growing up mixed-race. Instead, a dual identity should be celebrated precisely because it is complex, because it is a source of great personal enrichment in a world desperately in need of difference.