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‘Are you sure that’s your mummy? You’re different colours!’
Hearing that directed at my four-month old son, by a swimming teacher, left me gobsmacked.
My initial instinct was to laugh it off due to embarrassment, but as time went on, I became sad that she only saw colour, angry that she felt the need to mention it, and frustrated by her insensitivity.
When I was pregnant with my son, Otis, in 2015, I had all the usual thoughts, mainly hoping he would be healthy.
One thing I didn’t think too much about was the colour of his skin. My son would be mixed race, like me, and I assumed he would have my brown eyes.
Instead he was born with blue eyes, and light skin.
I never really thought about his colouring, until that comment at the swimming pool, which left me reeling.
After that incident, I felt more aware of assumptions people might make and would find myself overcompensating in public – making sure people heard me say I was his mum.
Sadly, there were comments, and they always stung.
Once on our way back from holiday as we went through customs, officers asked me to stop and questioned whether Otis was my child.
At a theme park my friend’s son was told to get on the ride with ‘mummy’ while my son was told awkwardly to, ‘go with the lady you are with’.
He often gets asked ‘is this mummy?’, by strangers at the shops and on days out, which sounds like an innocuous question but when you notice that non-mixed families aren’t being asked, it feels like more than that.
I know those people mostly don’t mean offence, but as my son, now seven has got older, he’s more aware of our different skin tones and the comments people make about it.
As a mixed race woman with a white mum I know how it feels to not look like a parent – growing up it was often assumed that my mum was simply looking after me.
When I was a child, much of society did not accept mixed race relationships, so I know my mum got comments about having a mixed child – with people assuming she was babysitting or the nanny.
There was an incident at a party where one of the other parents made a comment about the racial demographic of the school, using a racial slur, oblivious to who my mum’s child was.
Even now people will make comments in conversation because they see her white skin and know nothing of her children’s heritage. She soon sets them straight.
Until last year my son would tell me he was white – and his dad and I would try to explain that although he looked white, he was still made up of my Black and brown heritage.
It’s important to us that our son knows that we can’t know everything about people just by how they look.
But it was hard for him to connect what we told him with the white skinned blue-eyed boy he saw in the mirror.
To help him understand his Blackness we ensure that any questions about race and colour are answered honestly. Reading I Wish We Knew What to Say by Pragya Agarwal, which helps parents know what to say to children about race, improved things massively.
So did reading children’s books such as Along Came a Different by Tom McLaughlin, and Mixed by Arree Chung, which explained things in a way he can understand.
In a multicultural society, we should all be comfortable talking to our children about race – it’s not enough to declare your kids ‘don’t see colour’ and not discuss it.
On holiday recently, a waiter came over and said, ‘wow, it’s like copy and paste’ implying that my son and I looked the same.
For lots of people this probably happens often but it is extremely rare for people to comment on our similarities rather than our differences, so this interaction filled me with joy.
The fact that Otis looks white is in some ways a comfort to me.
He is unlikely to experience things I have – like, racial slurs as he walks down the street and no parent at the school gates will ever complain to him about the amount of Black people in an area.
But that too comes with danger – there are plenty of racists that won’t say anything negative to a person of colour’s face, but will make comments to people they assume are white.
So my son may hear demeaning language and discriminatory jokes about ethnic minorities, from people unaware of his Blackness.
This will put him in the potential hazardous situation where he has to make the decision to either remain silent and be complicit in the behaviour, or he speaks out and risks losing friendship, or worse.
I have every faith in the man he will be, but I still worry about how he will reconcile his heritage within himself when he looks at me, his grandfather, and extended family.
Now when people ask if he is mine or comment on our differences I still get a slight feeling of sadness or irritation. But now I just smile and proudly say ‘yes’, as does he.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
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