Growing up Black
Diving into Bringing Up Race: How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World...
Our book of October, Bringing Up Race: How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World, is out now to gulp whole. To whet your appetite, here is a lil sample…
Growing up Black
Growing up between Britain and Nigeria in the ‘80s, I had a shifting sense of identity. Nowadays, there’s a term for it: ‘third- culture kid’. It was disorienting at times, but also liberating. I realised early on that I didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Straddling two cultures added a depth and richness to my life, and an openness to new experiences.
My early encounters with racism were minor compared to what my older sister went through. As the first Black girl at our boarding school, she was once tied to a chair by fellow pupils hurling racial insults at her. She was six years old.
By the time I joined the school, I was one of at least four other Black kids, including my two older siblings. Still, my difference marked me out for jokes like: ‘Smile, otherwise we can’t see you,’ after the lights went out. Sometimes I wonder if my overtly smiley personality came as a response to comments like these. Toothy grin, lips stretched wide, just wishing to be seen.
Actually, I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky kind of girl. Old photographs, and scratchy video footage from early childhood reveal my giggly nature, or what my sister fondly calls me to this day, a ‘laughing jackass’.
My memories of growing up are overwhelmingly happy ones. Ours was a tight-knit school where I made many friends. We’d roll down hills, climb swing ropes, play Stuck-in-the-Mud and whisper secrets in the dark. I had my first long-term romance with an English boy. We ‘dated’ for two years, between the ages of 9 and 11.
Holidays in Nigeria meant endless cousins for sleepovers, afternoons spent devouring the contents of my parents’ book- shelves, or playing cowboys outside, climbing trees for fruit, watching The Sound of Music on repeat.
Yet, I also remember the helplessness of walking down a London street and someone shouting ‘Nigger’ from a car window. Being called a ‘blot on the landscape’ by a girl who would later call me her best friend. A toddler reaching out and trying to rub the brown off my skin. Cracks about Africa and monkeys and mud huts.
I remember my best friend at age nine pulling me in for a tight embrace and then looking at me with sorrow (or pity?) in her eyes.
‘I wish you were White,’ she said, before running off.
I can still feel the visceral shock of having the word ‘Nigger’ spat at me by a boy in my class. I didn’t know what I’d done, if anything at all, to offend or provoke him. Several friends leaped to my defence, but I had no words, and that was part of my shame. Words were my allies, my armour, but they had let me down.
I smiled and I carried on.
I could imagine a future, though, when things would be different. I wanted my kids to grow up in a world where nobody could make them feel less than they were, just because of the tone of their skin or the tightness of their curls. I wanted a life in which insults like ‘Nigger’ would never have the power to leave me speechless.
I had it all planned out. I would be worldly, wealthy and magnanimous. I’d adopt a rainbow tribe of babies from every corner of the planet, like Josephine Baker (or Angelina Jolie, as it happened). Of course, by that time, grand-scale poverty, disease and famine, nuclear disarmament and peace in the Middle East would be sorted too. Yes, I too had a dream.
It’s 2020 and I’m no longer dreaming. As a woman of colour in today’s Brexit and Trump climate, you have to stay woke.
Things didn’t turn out as I’d imagined, although we’ve certainly come a long way.
I live in one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth. London is one of the few places where I get to feel like me. Not solely a Black woman or a Nigerian or an African, but just another mum going about her day. I’ve lived in America, where – even in New York – I ‘felt Black’ every time I stepped out of my front door. In Nigeria, my birth country, I can be singled out for the way I talk, how I dress, what my kids look like. In London, I feel free. I can choose who I want to be.
Yet it’s hardly Utopia. People of colour in Britain over- whelmingly face social barriers. Class barriers. Stop-and-search barriers. Prison barriers. Employment barriers. Professional barriers. Media barriers. Economic barriers. School-exclusion barriers. Knife-crime barriers. Policing barriers.