4 4 Half Caste: Free To Be Me
man will pinch his girlfriend, and she will never come
back to him. Thus, every mixed race couple, every
mixed race child he sees is another affront to his
manhood. This is the fundamental, primitive terror that
underpins much of the right wing bleating about black
men stealing ‘our’ women, and that makes the mixed
race relationship such a threatening concept. However,
a similar archetype exists in black society: that of the
tempting, manipulative white female, who entices the
black man to stray, often to his ultimate cost. Again,
this is a myth that can be traced back to colonial
times, in the image of the slave and the plantationowner’s daughter or wife. Just as white society has a
powerful mistrust of the black man due to their
perception of his sexuality, black society mistrusts the
wh ite woman on the basis of hers, and the concept of
the white woman stealing ‘our’ men is widespread.
However, just as many negative conceptions of mixed
race people are located in sexual factors, so are the
ostensibly positive ones. For every person who finds
us loathsome, there is another who finds us attractive,
often from an aesthetic as well as an ideological point
of view.
‘I wish I were mixed-race and
beautiful and had everything
going for me...’
The Observer’s Barbara Ellen wrote in 2003:
“Years ago, US comedian Sandra Bernhard used a
routine in her live show where she loudly, wailingly
lamented: ‘I wish I were mixed race and beautiful and
had everything happening for me.’ You didn’t have to
be a white liberal wuss to find the sentiment both
funny and true. Most of us would have noticed, some
of us might even have been brave enough to comment
upon, the fact that there suddenly seemed to be an
awful lot of people around, men, women and children,
who simply looked, well, how can I put this, a hell of
a lot better than most of the rest of us.”
While you might not have to be a white, liberal wuss
to find Berhard’s sentiment ‘both funny and true’, nor
do you have to be a curmudgeonly, humourless racewarrior to find it both patronising and reductive. All
the same, it seems that it is not only well-meaning,
but silly journalists (the type of white, middle-class
individual who can, in all seriousness, and with no
sense of their own ridiculousness, use the term ‘white,
middle class’ as an insult) who see something
attractive, even aspirational in being mixed race.
However, even this side of the story is not straightforward. A black acquaintance and I were talking about
a music video we saw, by Lemar I think, and he