4 2 Half Caste: Free To Be Me
appearance was a burden, and something I would
attempt to deflect attention away from at all costs.
While my brother is so light-skinned that he is
assumed by all to be white, my straight hair, broad
nose, and light-brown skin meant that I was
continually quizzed about my ethnicity, by vindictive
‘the white race diluted by
interbreeding...’
classmates and well-meaning teachers alike. Come
playtime, many kids would run off to play football,
often officially dividing themselves into teams: ‘whites’
versus ‘pakis’, with the smattering of black kids
becoming honorary ‘pakis’ for the duration of the
game. While I usually steered clear of football, on the
one occasion I tried to get involved, I found myself in
a situation where no one wanted me.
“You ain’t playin’ with us! What the fuck are you? You
is an ‘alf-caste, innit?!”
I never tried to join in again.
While the term ‘mixed race’ is preferable to ‘half caste’
or ‘half breed’ it is inherently equivocal, suggestive of
a tainting, a dilution of ethnicity. Mixed race people
should be blessed with access to two different worlds
and heritages. However, in a society intolerant of
ambiguity, we often find that the only means of
avoiding rejection by both black and white societies is
to give in to the pressure to identify with the culture of
those we most closely physically resemble. Mixed race
people come in all shades of the human palette, and
the fact that we cannot easily be categorised makes
some people nervous and resentful, determined to
cram us into whichever box seems most appropriate.
Moreover, they seem to want to punish us for having
the audacity to want to be anything other than simply
‘black’ or ‘white’.
In 2001, Halle Berry was celebrated as the first black
woman to win an Oscar, and made a famously tearful
speech in which she paid tribute to the ‘women of
colour’, past and present, on whose behalf she was
accepting her prize. The daughter of a white,
Liverpudlian mother, Halle clearly chose her words
carefully, though she has spoken in the past of an
early, essentially pragmatic, decision to identify herself
as the rest of the world sees her: as black. As she once
commented, no one has ever mistaken her for white.