Mixed Heritage by Rose Miyonga

Last week, TK was fortunate to have the sparkled voice of Tahmina Beghum of XXY magazine as she shared her experience of dual identity and frustrations with rigid concepts of personhood. This week, we are so excited for Rose Miyonga, one of our contributing editors to share with us her experiences the same subject.

-Oyin Akande

My mother is White British and my father is Black Kenyan.

My sisters, Poppy and Jasmine, and I have had to explain what this means to people our whole life, so I have been aware of my racial identities for as long as I can remember.

During my early years, my family lived in Brixton. I don’t remember my brown skin or my hair (usually in dreadlocks or cut short) being an issue. Of course, in my immediate family, it didn’t matter.

I knew that my parents had different skin colors, just as I knew as they had different eye colors and that they loved my sister and me. It was just one thing that blended in with a whole host of other things that happened to be true about my family.

I had black friends, white friends, brown friends, and diversity was the norm, and I don’t remember feeling much need to question it.

When I was six years old, our family moved to Kenya, and my sister and I were enrolled in a local school on the outskirts of Nairobi.

The cracks in our ‘deeply flawed’ system of categorization and classification of ‘race’ were clearly exposed when our race changed somewhere between Heathrow and Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Suddenly, without warning or consultation, we were white. To my Kenyan classmates, my skin was pale, my hair was soft, and I could see that relatively, I was more white than most of my friends on the school playground… It was a lesson in ‘context’.

Race is a social construct, and to the six-year-old me, it seemed abundantly clear that the labels that were being used to define me were inaccurate and pointless.

This is not to say that race and racism do not exist, as the realities that we have to battle with every day make them evidently tangible, but that race and racism were created and constructed as tools to justify slavery and subjugation; to divide and dehumanize.

I didn’t fully understand how other people’s perception of my skin tone would come to deeply affect me when I was six, but I had learned something important, and something that would repeat itself in various iterations over and over again:

In a predominantly White country, I’m Black. In a predominantly Black country, I’m White. In both contexts it is my otherness that is noteworthy.

As a teenager in rural England, my Blackness was constantly highlighted by my peers, and I was forced to grapple with it, accept it, and eventually fall in love with it, and when I spent two years at school in the U.S., I remember trying in vain to explain to some (not all) of the people I encountered that I was actually not just black.

To certain people, my lack of whiteness was greater than anything else, it was all that mattered.

I’ve given up explaining now (well, for the most part). Although my heritage does matter,  I don’t want my skin color to define how I live my life. I can’t control how I am perceived and treated by others, but I can control how I look at myself, and I choose to look at myself without judgment, to see my beauty without boundaries, and to love myself without limitations.