Yasmin Dawes

[1999. I'm the baby in my Mom's arms. We’ve always been told our family could be a sitcom, and something about the nostalgic essence of this picture - the clothes, the hair, our youth - makes me feel like this could be our family sitcom poster. It's always been my favourite picture of us all.]

1998 | Solihull, UK | English & Jamaican

When I was little, I wasn’t really conscious of my mixed identity. I didn’t really think too much of it day to day - yet every so often something would catapult my brain into the world of identity which I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to articulate. The way I look at it - it’s suspended pain; it’s like the arrows that were shot from other people when I was in school have been travelling all this time and have finally landed. Or maybe they landed at the time, and it’s just the pain that has been postponed, to a time where I have greater understanding of the things people said. Said mostly out of ignorance, sometimes malice – regardless they’ve had a huge effect on me in my adulthood.

My household was a dream. We were happy kids and we had happy parents. Their life together began in 1990, after meeting two years earlier as my dad was my mom’s basketball coach in the police force; a real life ‘Love and Basketball’ with a twist. They did everything in their power to give us everything that they could, and whilst my three older siblings had a different mom, we grew up seamless and I am forever thankful that my parents nurtured an environment that allowed for that. We grew up in a white, middle-class village - I was one of, I think, only four mixed race (black and white) people in my year group. No black people, a few Asians. Ultimately very few people of colour. The time I spent around black people was with family, and at the sports centre where we spent a lot of time due to our heavy involvement with basketball, which I still adore being around today. All my friends in my immediate surroundings were white and when I was aged around 12, I found myself yearning to be around people who looked like me.

I’ve had a huge battle with my identity that I am still in the process of understanding myself. Being a part of two different races means that not only do you get the best of both, but you also get viewed as the ‘worst of both.’ I’ve found that whenever you do something good, it’s claimed as one side and whenever you do something bad it’s accused as the other. For a myriad of things, whether it be being well spoken, bad at dancing or a good cook. Leaving me questioning - why do people talk as though your race is something to be performed? It is something you simply are. I shouldn’t have to perform my blackness, it’s who I am and same again for whiteness.

When I did my semester abroad at Syracuse University, New York I immersed myself wholeheartedly into the black community, signing up to all the associations to meet as many people as I could. I would go to all the black fraternity parties and events as that is where I felt most accepted. Spending time in America I realised Jim Crow laws may have been lifted but a form of segregation is still very much alive. Regarding social events, people would hit you up and say “You going to the black, or Latina frats tonight?” or “Ah, I’m going to head to frat row (white frats)” etc; your nights were decided by which community you were partying with. America felt like an entirely different ball game, I saw and heard things I never had in England and was put in positions I’d never been in before. I’m a police kid and I’ve always felt a type of way about the “fuck the police” rhetoric we hear so much. I HATE generalisations and this is a huge one. Surprisingly, in the US I understood more of where this comes from. I still hate generalisations, but I gained more of an understanding as to the mistrust of the criminal justice system. Over there, if you’re mixed race – you’re black. This idea goes back to slavery with the ‘one drop rule.' Here in the UK you’re seen as what you are; mixed race. In the US, I felt like I knew which community I belonged to and felt comfortable there - which made returning more difficult.

Upon my return to the UK I had an awakening. I realised through discussions with some of the company I kept, whilst I don’t think it was conscious, some of the things being said were anti-white. Pro-black is not anti-white; however, many people confuse this because white supremacy is based on the decline of people of colour. Pro black is not based on anyone’s decline. I knew the things I was hearing and I couldn’t agree at all. It was the first time in a long time I was remembering who I was – made up of two races and that by rejecting my white side I was rejecting the very woman who gave birth to me. I remember realising this whilst trying to articulate myself in a room full of people and just crying - this was my worst nightmare; a feeling of confusion, hurt and lostness that I didn’t quite have control over. I had been trying to forget something that was innately ‘me’ and that hurt. Whilst this rejection was a subconscious thing, my conscious self wanted this to be over and for me to start living truthfully as me.

I’m now blessed to be living in the UK’s multicultural epicentre; London. When going back home I mainly just see family and close friends but every so often I will be at an event with people from school, or from my early teenage years, which happens to always be met with someone making a sarcastic remark about my vocal political beliefs or being called Serena Williams or every black footballer under the sun. It is a challenge, because a lot of things I wouldn’t have addressed in the past I now do, or I simply cut people from my life. Even when considered a joke (on their end), I’m still flabbergasted by their lack of understanding of how words can have a deep impact on others.

I think the goal to self-acceptance is constantly moving – just when you think you’ve cracked the code; something happens and the safe is locked again. Something happens and you realise you don’t entirely know who you are. You don’t entirely know what you are meant to do in this situation. You know what being mixed race is, but you don’t entirely know what that means all the time. I just know it's who I am. It’s hard, but ultimately there is also so much beauty in where the struggle comes from. I can come back to the fact that I am the product of my parents’ love. It just so happens that he was a black man and she was a white woman, with all the odds against them, they went through it so that they could experience life together and out of that came; me. How can that be something to be ashamed of? I am so thankful that my parents had the strength to love each other out loud.

[2019. That’s me at the front in the striped jumper. This is the latest full family photo that we have. As there is so many of us, it's hard to get us all together at the same time. So last Christmas I got my best friend whose a photographer to come and snap some photos of the way my family has expanded.]