Thoughts on being bi-racial

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to invalidate anyone’s experience with racism and race identity struggle. I understand that as a mixed person with lighter skin my experience will not have been nearly as bad as other POC. I intended only to share my thoughts on what being mixed race has meant for me.

Much of my identity consists of names. Names are a strange thing. We use them as a means of address and a means of understanding. Once we know the name of something we can allocate it to a specific space, a specific category and thus understand it better. The same can be said for people and for racial identity. People love to know “where you are from” so you can be put in your box, understood. My names are confused and contradictory because my identity is split. My mother’s family is from the Punjab in India and my father is from Suffolk, England. I am both a minority and a white person. I am part of two distinctly different boxes, or as my white cousin once called me, in a strangely commodifying way, ‘50/50 bread, the best of both worlds’.

The Indian Box: ‘paki’, ‘Muslim’, ‘curry’. Whilst I have never been called ‘curry’ it is a name I include for its repeated use by my peers. Highschool brought endless ‘curry’ jokes, ignorant assumptions and mixing up of different types of brown people. For many people, brown meant Muslim and we were all put in the same, digestable category. It was beyond comprehension that brown people could be diverse within themselves, that some of us were Muslim, some Hindu, some Sikh etc. I, in fact, am not Muslim. But no matter how many times I told someone I could eat pork but not beef, that in my religion men did not wear turbans, I would still be asked the same questions. No one cared that brown people could be different from each other, they only cared that you were brown so you were different from them and you were all the same different. With that, the harshest name I have been given is ‘paki’. In sixth form, a guy I was talking to found out that I was Indian and said something along the lines of, 'oh so you're a paki'. Again, I am from the Punjab, not Pakistan, but all brown people are the same. I was very taken aback by this racial slur that I thought, at least in diverse London, people did not use anymore. My mother’s generation had been called ‘paki’, people openly racist when she was growing up, and I was shocked to be transported back in time as if nothing had changed. Nowadays, I found racism to be more covert like the little microaggressions I faced. This brings me to ‘curry’. In a 'starter pack' quiz a peer made about our friendship group, one of the images they used to describe me was of Indian dishes, or 'curry' (curry, by the way, is not what Indian people call food. It is in fact, only the name of one dish, that I have never actually eaten). Someone called them out for this and their friend came to their rescue to say I am always 'talking about curry'. I had not spoken to this person one on one for months and I do not recall ever having a conversation with them about 'curry'. Whilst not as straightforward as calling me a ‘paki’, the sting of the ‘curry’ joke has always made me aware of my position as an outsider. My Indian-ness is my defining trait, curry being one of the only personality aspects I am afforded. Sometimes, I would make these jokes myself, before people had the chance to make them at my expense. I would please the white people by going along with their ignorant stereotypes. The precedent being, if you objected to these kinds of comments, you couldn’t take a joke, you were too sensitive. In order to retain “friends” I have had to call myself by their names.

The White Box: ‘fake Indian’, ‘coconut’. Whilst my difference has been repeatedly pointed out to me by my white peers, my whiteness stops me from being fully different, fully Indian. In this strange no-man's-land I am not entirely either race. The names I allocate to this box present my confused identity. ‘Fake Indian’ was termed by another cousin (this time Indian) and is a name that used to make me angry. It is not my fault I was born with a leg in each box, it is not my fault I am not Indian enough. Along the same lines is ‘coconut’. A comedic name suggesting one is “brown on the outside and white on the inside”. It often refers to brown people who grew up in Western cultures. ‘Coconut’ goes one step further for me, the ‘fake Indian’, because I am quite white passing. Being not that brown on the outside means I am almost entirely engulfed by my “inner” whiteness. Along with this comes white privilege. Although “exotic” I am generally quite white passing. On my 18th birthday I had bleached hair and I had drawn freckles onto my face. My masi (aunt) asked my sister why I was ‘trying to look white’. I wasn’t, I just did. Bleach blonde hair afforded me the greatest deal of white privilege. When I arrived at university in my first year with freshly touched-up roots, people assumed I was entirely white. When I went to Morocco with my mother and sister, I went straight through security, yet they were questioned. Relentless probing about where they were from, where in India, had they ever been to India etc. This is perhaps the most obvious example of white privilege I have ever experienced. I must have experienced it in other forms too, but these are often times more hidden. This concept is confusing, because it is difficult to decipher where I stand. What portion of white privilege do I get and how can I use this portion to help my POC peers?

Perhaps the best name to encompass my confusion is my own: Jeevan Hammond. Half Indian, half White. My first name means ‘life’ in Hindi and has rarely been pronounced correctly by teachers and people who read it, even when corrected. When I was a child, I told people that my first name was actually Georgina, my middle name, because it sounded more English. In a sense I was trying to force myself into the White Box so I could be “normal”. Now, I don’t force myself into either box. My identity is a melted mixture which I cannot simply separate. I no longer need those boxes or those names, I have grown comfortable with my own.

Thank you for reading <3