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.