Drum Magazine Issue 2 | Page 47

Half Caste: Free To Be Me 4 5 All the same, a lot of people out there in advertisingland seem to like us. Is it simply because we are meant to be good-looking? Is that why Gap adverts are filled with young, Bambi-eyed, khaki-clad mixed race men and women? What is the real message behind that Gap ad? My fear is that the dilution of blackness that some fear mixed race people represent is being made real in the media. The advertisers have cottoned on to the fact that they can trumpet their inclusiveness and multi-cultural credentials, without having to be associated with ‘real’ black people. Furthermore, their mixed-race models can be dressed in pastels, made to smile and dance, so that they become safer, quite simply because they are made ‘whiter’. We are becoming the ‘acceptable face’ of blackness. Those in the black community who have cried ‘sell out’ are being made right. Now 11% of the UK’s ethnic population. Is Britain becoming the new Brazil? commented that there were some nice looking ‘brownies’ in it. I’d never heard that term before and asked him to explain: “Brownies – mixed race girls”. He obviously had no idea about my background, so I asked him if there was a term for mixed race blokes. “Yeah, ‘wankers’!” was his reply, “They just think they’re too nice”. The impression seemed to be that ‘we’ want to have our cake and eat it, to cherry-pick the best of the stereotypes of both worlds: to be king of the dancefloor and the bedroom like the black man, and to be respectable and sophisticated like the white man. Again, cultural and sexual stereotypes collide with bewildering and by now predictable complexity. Are we being accepted or are we being sold? Many conceptions of what mixed race relationships are about, and what mixed race people are like are based on stereotypes, cultural and sexual, that speak volumes about those holding them, but say nothing about who ‘we’ are as people. When fleeing the hatred of others, one’s instinct is to turn toward those who claim to like and accept you. But with friends like the ‘Generation M’ brigade, whose support seems superficial at best, who needs enemies? I have long stopped waiting for society to accept me. I will never be ‘just’ black or white, nor would I wish to be. I would love for both black and white people to respect me unequivocally for who I am. But if I, and people like me, face the choice of either being demonised by those who hate us, or patronised by those who purport to love us, we may have to get used to our place on the sidelines. We don’t want to play that game.