Jacob Seelochan

[2004. At Disneyland with my two brothers - I’m the one on the right- we were celebrating my little brother’s birthday.]

1997 | Nottingham, UK | Guyanese, Irish, Polish & English

I don’t remember using the term ‘mixed race’ until I got to London for University. Before then, I’d been more than proud to recite each and every country that made up my lineage. 3/4 of my grandparents are immigrants, and most of my extended family are scattered across the globe, so to simplify myself into the category of ‘mixed race’ never felt like it did my heritage justice. Condensing my family history into just two words felt like an apology, a way to not take up too much space or time. It wasn’t till I was training in London to be an actor, (a career path in which you need to know yourself in order to sell yourself), that I felt forced to accept my new identity as just a ‘mixed’ person. Currently in the creative arts there’s this very structural divide between white and everything else, and it feels like accepting that was what pushed me into using the term mixed race. And even then, when the word ‘mixed’ is central to my identity, I still feel like I’m always being asked to ‘pick a side’, to choose whether to sit with the brown kids or the white kids in the playground. Sitting in between them just isn’t good enough.

However, that’s not the first time I realised people saw me differently. That feeling goes way back to my Catholic Secondary School. I started there just after the school had received a huge influx of Polish students, and I remember this being a talking point in the playground. Not in a way that felt outright xenophobic, (my classroom was too multinational for anyone to get away with that), but I definitely sensed that the through-and-through British kids had inherited this “fear of the immigrants taking over”. We as children weren’t given the tools to understand our Polish brethren, (which is especially wild to think about now that I identify as third generation Pole), and as a result I remember a lot of hostility towards them. Bar a few, the playground was pretty much divided between us & them. I think it’s because of this that my otherness took a while to be weeded out. I slipped by casually in my first few years of Secondary School, knowing I was more olive-skinned than my friends, but still passing as an honorary white person. Plus, some of the people I hung around with were first generation kids of African and Asian descent, so again I had a lot of people to hide my otherness behind. It wasn’t till friendships developed that my background and ethnic makeup started to be questioned. 

One of the first times I remember being singled out was at the fair, back in my early teens. I’d made friends with some pupils from a neighbouring school, and we’d all gone down to hang out and eat junk food. But as we were passing the dodgems, I realised that my friends had disappeared. When I turned around to look for them, I found them all right behind me, in the midst of a discussion about the size of my butt! Apparently it was bigger than everyone else's, or it moved differently, or some other inherent physical property was unlike what they knew as ‘normal.’ I can’t remember if I brought it up freely or they pried it out of me, but the connection was made between my big behind and my Brazilian heritage. (I should say, until recently my family believed we were from Brazil, not Guyana. But after reaching out to a distant cousin we’ve found out how complex our South-American family actually is). Anyhow, that became my nickname: Brazilian Butt. People changed my name in their phones; friends would often walk behind me to stare at it while I walked; sometimes I’d even be introduced to new people by that nickname. 

I think weirdly that’s what sparked the ferocious pride I feel for my heritage. Don’t get me wrong, it was embarrassing and degrading to have both friends and strangers stare at my butt for most of my teenage years, but I came to accept that this was going to be something I could either reclaim or shy away from. Besides, most white people would kill for a big booty! So I found joy inside of being singled out, and started offering the connection up between my heritage and my curvature to people who hadn’t even asked. It’s highly likely that my shape and heritage have nothing to do with each other, and that embracing and repeating this stereotype became a way to justify my differences to others. But mainly, as a child presented with no other obvious connections to my heritage, this was just the easiest access point on offer. 

This inverted sense of pride came with some unexpected repercussions. By mid-Catholic School I was known for having a Brazilian Dad, and he became a sort of mythical figure for students and teachers alike. I remember a silly rumour going round when my Dad was away for a business trip, that he was working for the Brazilian Mafia, and that he was probably murdering someone or in a shoot-out as we sat in class. One-time my Biology teacher paused her lesson to start an entire-class discussion about it! I don’t know if I can confidently draw the connection between that and my status in school, but I will say around that time my bullies eased off and I became a pretty well-known kid around campus. By the end of that year, my otherness was on full display and something I was totally proud of, even if I didn’t speak the language and had never even met my South American family. 

It’s only recently I started to recognise the more uncomfortable sides of my new-found, hyper-racialised self. There was the time my bestest friend, who I’d spend every lunch circling the school discussing Breaking Bad or class politics with, refused to accept that I was nothing more than just “white”. In his eyes, my Irish-Polish-English heritage completely negated anything ‘other’ inside of me. I don’t know if it was his own staunch Irish-Catholic upbringing that gave him this autonomy over my ethnic makeup, (perhaps he’d taken it upon himself to bring out the fellow Irish man inside of me), or maybe he simply had never been introduced to a mixed-ethnic person that wasn’t half-black-half-white. Whatever the case, I don’t think I was ever able to make him see me for every part of me. 

There’s also the time I was cast as Link in the stage-musical Hairspray, only to find out that one of the chorus members has told everyone I was “too black” for that part; the innate anxiety building up every time anyone had to pronounce my surname in public; the moment I stopped ticking “White British” on forms and joined those who are forced to identify as “Other”; the time my Youth Theatre leader told me I was “too unusual” to be put up for professional auditions;  the many times a stranger has refused to accept that I don’t identify as Indian; and, of course, the way I felt the need to homogenise myself as ‘mixed race’ when I moved to London. None of these are hate crimes, they’re all just products of ignorance, and serve as constant reminders of my differences. I think in some ways they’ve allowed me to see myself in a way my parents never had to, but the constant othering has also created a lot of self-doubt and struggles with self-acceptance and finding community. 

Speaking of my parents, it’s interesting to think about the role my family played in the forming of my racial identity. My home life was very white. Progressive and artsy, yes, but very white in essence. I’ve never met my South American family, only seen pictures and heard stories of them, so the only vaguely non-white thing about my upbringing was my Dad’s skin tone and his cooking! Even my Irish and Polish sides weren’t a big part of my formative years. I think there’s something to be said about immigrants of my grandparents’ generation that makes them want to assimilate very quickly into British culture, and not talk much of their own backgrounds. I’m sure there’s a political reasoning behind that -my Irish grandma has not forgotten the hate the British had for the Irish in the not-so-distant past- so perhaps there was a survival element in them trying to blend in as much as possible. But that does mean, as a born and raised Brit, that my connections to Ireland, Poland and Guyana often feel weak at best. I’ve still yet to visit any of those countries, which means that my relationship to those cultures has been very much learned through the lens of an outsider. At times I feel like an imposter, because I’m often accessing my own history through the same books and films and research that anyone can find. But my solace is in the family stories I’m starting to learn from my grandparents, and the unique circumstances that brought those Polish, Guyanese and Irish people to the British Isles to start with. New information and opportunities for growth are starting to pop up everywhere. It was only mid-quarantine that I made first contact with my South American family, when my cousin confessed that up until this point he didn’t even know I existed! And there was also the time last year, when I went through the emotional experience of searching for my step-great-grandfather’s cigarette papers in the Imperial War Museum. He’d written on them to his family, from inside of Auschwitz, where he was a political prisoner. So it’s not a failure to not know everything about your past as soon as you’re born, but in fact an opportunity for self-discovery.

However, the thing that constantly eats away at my personal validity as a mixed person, the thing that regularly reignites the imposter syndrome inside of me, is the fact that only one of my grandparents is non-white. It’s the reason I find myself thinking “I’m not brown enough to be truly worthy of the non-white label”. It’s why when someone asks where I’m from, I can see them waiting for the non-white nation to come up, and I feel it in myself too! I think “Should I start with Guyana, or end with it? Or put it in the middle so it seems like it’s not that big of a deal?” This is especially volatile in the entertainment industry, where race and non-whiteness are becoming desirable. I find myself playing a part in exoticising my own narrative, playing a part in the othering that has been done to me since I was a teenager, constantly wondering if I’ll be BAME enough to tick the quota in their heads or just slip between the cracks. And sometimes I find that staying quiet about my background is the best way to move forward, which of course is only possible because of my ability to blend in, which in itself is a form of internalised racism. White-passing privilege is something I’m still unpacking as I try to understand my relationship with white supremacist ideology and the role I’ve played and play in perpetuating white power structures. But I should acknowledge it, as I’ve benefited so much from it. It feels like our constant task as white-passing multiracial people is to recognise where we have benefited from white privilege, and where we have been excluded from it, so that we don’t confuse our experiences with those who don’t have the option to “pretend to be white”. 

What I want monoracial people to take away from this is that just as your story is different from your neighbour’s, your Father’s, your sister’s; know that each and every multiracial person has a unique story to tell, and a unique experience of race and racism. I’m reminded of the section in Akala’s book Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, where he writes about his race changing from country to country. In one place he’s racialised as white, the next place black, the next place mixed race, depending on that country’s history and relationship to racial classes. This is, to a lesser or more degree, all of our experiences as multiracial folk. By just being alive we present a challenge to what society has taught us are the 3 or 4 racial groups. So give us space. Allow us to go on our journeys of self-discovery, and offer us support where you can and challenges where you should. We are on a different journey, a journey of challenging the binaries that have been set upon us, and that fetishising or discrediting us and our experiences speaks more about your unconscious bias then it does my hard-to-place skin tone. 

Note: In March 2020, I gathered a few friends to film a story I’d written from my own experiences of mixed-race erasure in the entertainment industry. We made a short from it, called ‘A Casting Room’, and if you’d like to gain a better understanding of where I’m coming from, please have a watch. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83DsnuCQRyg

[2019. Me (right) and my older brother at a dinner in Spain.}