Jessica Whitehurst

[1998. My brother and I have been inseparable since day one, as you can see by this picture – the quicker I learnt how to crawl, the quicker I could play with him.]

1998 | London, UK | English & Jamaican

"You can’t play with us… you’re not fully white” – I still remember the look in that little girl’s face in the playground. It was like she didn’t even know what she had said to me, and I had no idea either. That day, my mum had to explain to my 7-year old self what “being mixed race” was. She explained very delicately, “You are just the love of your mother and the love of your father." I’ll always admire her for that. As a black woman, she could have let her anger from societal racism leak onto me, but she never did. 

Before that, I was busy being a kid. Having no worries, playing with my older brother and definitely not thinking about my mixed race identity. I had a white dad, and a black mum - it was my “normal”. I grew up in South London, my home. Imagine the tower blocks, loud markets, red buses and where my parents met whilst working in an office. My mum was juggling work with being an international athlete, and my dad had just moved down to scary London from a small town near Blackpool. Whenever I think back to how that time must have been for both of them - I just think “brave”. Of course the challenge of being in an interracial relationship in the 80/90s, and raising mixed kids wasn’t a big thing - they had lived their lives taking risks. They worked effortlessly to drill into my brother and I that we were just a product of love. We were a creation of the fact love has no colour. Our family life early on was a dream – we would drive up north every other month to see my white family, and come home to my Jamaican Grandma’s saltfish and ackee, without feeling like anything was different. Growing up between the two places, I was socialised into fitting in wherever I was. My white cousins in Blackpool were my best friends - it was us against the world. We had the same blood, that’s the only thing that mattered to me. Through it all, I was never alone because I had my big brother, who would happily correct anyone, bluntly saying, “I’m mixed race, it’s not that confusing”.

Our family dynamic changed and my Jamaican grandma began to help with raising us a lot more - aka “Gran Gran”. Part of the Windrush generation, my Gran Gran oozed selfless love. She was proud of her country and more importantly proud of her family. She was living a better life in her new country. Picture walking into a warm house covered in family pictures from around the world, the Jamaican national anthem pinned on the wall and an elderly black woman, cooking Jerk Chicken in her dutch pot. The kitchen was like the family meeting room, that’s where everything happened and that’s always where you found my Gran Gran. Being around one of your cultures more than the other comes with a biracial-type-of-guilt. A guilt that only other mixed race people may understand, where you feel bad for not being good at the balancing act between both sides of yourselves. But on this side everyone understood my frustration with being followed round a shop by a security guard, and the pain of whiplash from ducking your head to dodge the hands slowly reaching into your curls. Gran Gran devastatingly passed away from cancer when I was 13 and I wasn’t only grieving my angel, I was grieving the main source of one of my cultures. 

When I think back to being a mixed race teenager, I think of survival. I wanted to “fit in” and not “be”. In my school, the groups went by your colour; there were the “black boys”, the “white girls”, but never the “mixed race people”. It wasn’t acknowledged (back then) as a whole ethnicity in itself and I just wanted to belong somewhere, whoever would take me in really. There were a handful of biracial (black and white) kids in my year, but I distinctly remember being the only person with a white dad. I constantly got “Wow your parents must have really been in love” or “You don’t look like your dad at all” – as if that changed anything. It’s the one thing that would make me lose my cool. It still is. It was like I had to prove who my parents were, but in my heart I wasn’t just half of each of them - I was made up of two full humans. 

Secondary school welcomed the birth of the “lighty” phrase. Rooted in numerous different meanings, “lighty” has been used as a term for mixed race people. However, along with the name comes a stereotype that if you're mixed, you think you're “too good” for everyone else and you never reply to messages, for example – the type of person everyone hates. I actively spent the rest of my teenage years trying to be the complete opposite of this, with the inner fear that if I identified with being mixed race, I was identifying with the “lighty” stereotype. This was twinned with the wider world analysis, that all of my biracial heroes weren’t identifying with being multicultural. I had just started to focus more on my dream of being an actress, when I found out that Halle Berry was the “first black woman to win an Oscar” – and that term was used in the media everywhere. But she looked exactly like me. She had one black parent and one white parent. She was having the career of my dreams. Yet, no one was calling her mixed race. 

Getting into drama school is one of my biggest achievements to date. In my first year, I used to walk into every class praying they didn’t realise they had the wrong Jessica. They didn’t. However, my biggest blessing made me realise I was the furthest from “Normal”. Rooted in elitist tendencies, I was around actors who had never had mixed race friends before and had definitely not grown up in multicultural south London. Drama school is beautiful, but intense - you spend the whole first year “finding yourself”, so you never get lost in character. This growth let go of all feelings of needing to “fit in” for me. I had suddenly found who I wanted to be and how I wanted to help in this world. I was there to achieve my goals, which I knew were possible now. I wanted to start my journey, being the “Halle Berry” I needed growing up. I want other biracial kids to watch TV one day, see a person who looks like them and identify with them and own their ethnicity; an ethnicity which involves not only aspects of the countries our parents are from, but an aspect of who we are. 

Being mixed race is my superpower. We are born being able to adapt to any room we are placed in. The journey to my identity wasn’t easy, and the racist discrimination I receive throughout my life is going to be faced by a rooting in such a strong love, it’s never going to win. I cannot wait to have mixed race kids one day - and they will be mixed regardless of my partner's race - and repeat my mother’s wise words “You are just the love of your mother and the love of your father."

[2020. With both of us living away, it’s been nice to come back to our Mum’s house, and have some family time during lockdown as adults – ps. I haven’t got hurt from play fighting yet!]