Black All Year - An Antiracist Discussion Part 2

When did you first become aware of your race? Join me, Steph Edusei, along with writer, performer and producer, Risaria Langley, as, in the second part of our discussion, we explore the profound experiences that shaped our understanding of race and racism. Risaria recounts when she first became aware of her whiteness and I share my own journey, from enduring racial taunts to the unsolicited touches to my hair, revelations that only later clarified as racism.

This is at times an emotional exploration of mixed heritage and ancestry with us as we uncover the complexities that come with discovering one's roots. Sharing a friend's late discovery of her Indian ancestry, we journey through historical interracial relationships and the secrecy that often cloaked them. We dive into the history of Ghana's coastal regions, revealing how pregnant enslaved women found freedom and integration in local society.

We encourage you to listen to part one of this conversation for more honest and insightful discussion.

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Original music by Wayne C McDonald, #ActorSlashDJ
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Chapters

• 0:09 Awareness of Racism
• 3:22 Awareness of Race
• 13:14 Exploring Mixed Heritage and Ancestry
• 17:21 Continuing Conversations on Race

Transcript

[Steph Edusei] (0:09 - 2:21)

Hi everyone, I'm Steph Edusei and this is Black All Year. This week I'm bringing you the second part of my discussion with Risaria Langley, writer, performer, producer and friend. If you've listened to last week's episode then you'll know that back in May 22, Risaria and I had a discussion prompted by Ibram X Kendi's The Anti-Racist Deck. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, you might want to do that too, but this one should stand alone. I hope you enjoy. So I'd like to take us on to a second card and this one you've already partially answered.

So the first question is when did you first become aware of racism? And you've described that time when neighbours were trying to stop a Black family moving in and your dad, the hero that he was, ripped up the petition. I think that was brilliant.

I'd have loved to have just seen the look on people's faces when he did that. I think for me, it's funny because I don't know whether I just walked around with rose coloured spectacles on or whatever, but I kind of used to think I hadn't been aware of it and I can remember as a teenager having stuff shouted at me and things like that, but I think there were probably two things for me. So when I was in primary school, people used to sing "Cadbury's make them and they cover them in chocolate" at me. Now, I think I knew that that was a racist thing, but because I'm who I am, I haven't really changed that much. I used to say, well, that's all right because I love chocolate. So you're the stupid one.

But you know, this was kids. But I think for me, the thing that probably struck me most when I look back was that I was really aware of being different and people treating me differently. So I think, I mean, you and I have spoken a lot about imposter syndrome and things like that.

And I think that it was, mine was really fed by the fact that people treated me differently and people would do things from a very early age, like they touch, randomly touch my hair and, and things like.

[Risaria Langley] (2:21 - 2:25)

This really surprised me when you said this, that people just touch your hair. 

[Steph Edusei] (2:26 - 3:25)

Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's happened my entire life where people just, and I got my hair cut. I used to have very long hair and then I had it cut when I was seven, quite short.

So I had that kind of like a bit of an Afro and people would just come along, go boing, boing, boing, and literally say the word boing, boing, boing, as they patted my head. And whereas at the time I wouldn't have called it racism, looking back, I knew that that's what it was. And then, you know, we're talking about the seventies and eighties.

So there was the really overt stuff that you would just get in the street. I used to get called, you'd get things like wog shouted at you and stuff like that. I can't ever recall being called the N word, but it was just there.

I think it wasn't even that, that I, I don't, I can't remember a time it wasn't there. And then the other question on this card, which I'm really interested in, in your response is when did you first become aware of your race?

[Risaria Langley] (3:34 - 5:29)

That's an interesting one, because I was going to say earlier, I don't know that the only time I describe myself as white is on these, these ethnicity, on the diversity forms. I, I never think of describing myself verbally as white. And the first, when I was about eight, we went to stay with my uncle and aunt who lived in Surrey.

And this isn't about skin colour, but it's about, I remember the conversation in the car coming home because my uncle and aunt had thought my sister and I were real shockers because our accents were so terrible, because we were Northern. But my uncle and aunt had very broad Surrey accents. And my uncle had been, was a Geordie who'd moved to the South.

And there was this big debate about getting us elocution lessons. And my parents decided not to. And the irony is that when we, whenever I've gone away, when I started working away, people were surprised that I was Northern because they didn't think I had much of an accent.

And my local people here are surprised I'm local because I lived away for 30 years, but I don't have much of an accent. I think it was, you know, and, and in a way it's this, we have these microcosms relating to accents, whereas even where I've moved to now, the accent in South Tyneside is different to Sunderland and to Newcastle. But if you went to London, you would call yourselves Geordies probably.

[Steph Edusei] (5:29 - 6:56)

And I think that it's a really interesting comparative in a lot of ways. So, and actually it's that thing of, so I would get both. It's that thing of, you know, cause I know exactly what you mean when people go, Oh, you're very broad, aren't you?

And I go, actually, I'm really not that broad. I can be very broad at times and other times I can be very, very posh. And I think that, that there is that, there's that inference that because you have a Northeastern Geordie accent, therefore you are thick.

And I forgot, Steph, who's a TV presenter, she's a very educated woman, very successful, has science degrees and all kinds of things. And yet when she started on TV, people were slamming her because they said she was uneducated because she has a Middlesbrough accent. And there's that inference that because you have an accent, you, you're somehow less than, and you're less educated and you're common and you're obviously going to be a criminal and all that type of thing.

And so there's kind of, there's that, and that there's a lot of similarities there between what people think of people with strong accents, like, like the Geordie accent and people of colour. I think the difference is you had an option that your parents fortunately didn't take, which was you could have elocution lessons. So actually that can be removed as a barrier, whereas obviously ethnicity didn't.

And I think it's really interesting. You said, and I thought that might be the answer that you, you've never really been aware of your race.

[Risaria Langley] (6:57 - 8:20)

I think for me, I've just remembered when I was, I was working, I was a freelance archaeologist. In my early twenties and in between digs, I used to make money going to London, temping, or I worked as a cleaner in a private clinic in Harley street. And I was the only white English, white British cleaner.

And the, there was a Nigerian cleaner there who coincidentally knew one of my former Nigerian law lecturers. And she, she started, she used to pinch me. She used to pinch my skin to make, to bruise me, to show that my skin would bruise, but hers wouldn't.

And I was, yeah, I was really shocked because I'd never had anybody do that. And she later took me, she invited me to her home, which was a bed sit. And it was full of things, duvets and pans, because she was sending everything back.

She had children back in Nigeria and she was working to send things back to them. And she was the one that made me aware of my skin color.

[Steph Edusei] (8:20 - 8:35)

And, you know, of course she did bruise. It's just that you wouldn't see that, that dark purple marking that you get bruising. That's an interesting one.

And I'm sorry that you were pinched. That's horrible. What an awful thing to do to somebody.

[Risaria Langley] (8:36 - 8:57)

I know. And I was like, you know, I was like, what is this? You know?

And, and part of me thought that, you know, has, she must have been treated badly in this, in some way to want to do this to someone. And I felt terrible that she, I thought I never want to be living like this, where I'm apart from my family.

[Steph Edusei] (8:57 - 8:57)

Yeah.

[Risaria Langley] (8:58 - 9:00)

Just the basic things.

[Steph Edusei] (9:00 - 10:06)

Yeah. And, and unfortunately, yeah, that's, that's what so many people even now, you know, they, they'll do, they'll come and they work and they send every, they're living themselves in, in real poverty because everything is going back to support their family members. I think for me, if I was to ask myself that question about when I first became aware of my race, I don't think I was ever not aware of my race.

I think what's interesting for me being mixed heritage though, was that that has changed. So I was always aware that I wasn't like my white friends, but I was also aware that I wasn't like a lot of my Black family because they were darker skin than I was. And I was somewhere in between and, and going back to that thing about imposter syndrome, I didn't fit.

So I have siblings, I fitted with them. And actually we did have a few friends that were mixed heritage as well, because there were Ghanaian fathers and white mothers. I think they're all that way around rather than the other way around.

But actually I knew that it didn't fit and there were no adults who looked like me at all.

[Risaria Langley] (10:06 - 10:06)

Right.

[Steph Edusei] (10:06 - 12:39)

There were no mixed hair. I mean, you know, the seventies and the eighties, you didn't really have mixed heritage adults. So when I look back on what my parents did in the sixties, a mixed heritage couple getting together was just, I mean, that was shocking.

It was radical. My sister was born in the mid sixties. She'll love me for saying that.

But she was, that was, that was really quite radical to, to, to do that. But there, there weren't other people that looked like me. Yeah.

I think as, and I used to say, I used to describe myself as half Black, half white, or, and then it became half Black. And I can remember my mom saying to me, why did you say half Black? Because you're, you're just as much white as you are Black.

And I said to her, you know what mom, because nobody sees the white in me. They see me, they see the Black in me. But when I walk in the room, nobody would say that's somebody who's half white.

They would say that's somebody who's Black or half Black. So I described myself based on what, how other people would see me. There was that awful term half cast that was used a lot.

And then it, it, you know, I would say mixed heritage. I don't like dual heritage because actually lots of people are more than dual. So I tend to say mixed heritage.

I think the difference now is that actually, because there are far more people who are like me, it's different. And I think one, the moment for me that it really changed was I used to do, I used to be a children's entertainer ages ago, alongside working in the NHS. And I remember doing a party and there was a little girl there who was very similar coloring, looked like she was mixed heritage.

And she said her daddy was a doctor and that he worked and I worked out who it was. It was somebody that worked in the same hospital that I worked in. So then the next week I happened to bump into him in the corridor and he was Nigerian.

And I said, Oh, I think I met your daughter at the weekend. And he went, really? I said, yes, there was a party that I did.

And there she was. And he went, that's what she meant. And I said, what do you mean?

He said, he, she came running home so excited and said, daddy, there was a woman there who looked just like me. And I thought it was, I'm getting quite emotional about it because I didn't have that as a kid. But for her, I was that woman who looked like her.

Well, I thought that's important. Yeah, that really sorry. I wasn't expecting all stuff.

[Risaria Langley] (12:39 - 12:42)

No, don't. This is goosebumps. This is amazing.

[Steph Edusei] (12:42 - 13:21)

It was, it was, it was wonderful to hear that she'd been so excited because she'd seen somebody look like her. Now I still know the couple and they're a wonderful couple and actually they've got a number of daughters and I don't know which one it is. I'll have to ask them one day, which, which one it was that, that I did the party with.

But yeah, it was just, I thought that's important. It's important that people can see people who look like this and that they know that. So for me, it was kind of like, Oh, well, everybody I know who looks like me is the same age as me.

And gradually I felt more comfortable being mixed heritage as there's more mixed heritage people out there.

[Risaria Langley] (13:21 - 14:41)

And also who are willing to reveal themselves because I'm remembering, um, I was a guinea pig for a woman who was doing Shiatsu because I trained in Shiatsu and Chinese medicine. And for a year she was helping me. And she came around one day and she was really, I could see something had happened.

And I said, do you want to talk? And she said, yes. She said, I've just discovered a family secret.

And she said, I'm not, I don't remember. It was one of the grandparents that was Indian, but had never been talked about in her family. And she had never been told about this.

And she realized that this was why she had, she looked, she'd never thought of herself as anything but white, but she had a sallow skin and she realized that this was her Indian heritage. And she just found it so hard to take on board that this had been hidden from her within the whole family for so long.

[Steph Edusei] (14:41 - 16:41)

And I think nowadays it's that thing of you actually, you know, when you hear something like that, you think why and how could you do that? But when you think back to the fact that it would have been disgraceful, it would have been shameful that somebody had, had had a, a child with a Black or Asian person, you can kind of understand how then if the child didn't appear, particularly dark skinned, and I can remember hearing about kind of, you know, turn of the last century time when you would have lots of people out in India and they'd take an Indian wife or mistress. And if a child was then born, they would do things like try to keep, if the child was quite fair skinned, they'd keep them out of the sun as much as possible. And the, the wife, the white wife would be made to take that child as their own.

And, and it's interesting, actually thinking back to, to my cultural heritage in Ghana. So, you know, big area for the slaves being taken and particularly along the coast. There are lots of people living along the coast of Ghana around the Cape coast, where the slave castles are, who are called things like Richardson, as their surname, and a lot have quite fair skin.

And some even have blue, bluish green eyes. And it's because what used to happen there was people who were involved in the slave trade would, that's not, in other words, rape a slave. If they became pregnant, they were freed and not sent over to the Americas.

And they were given a house in the town. So, and I think there was actually, there's an actor, and I can't remember his name, and he's been on Casualty and a couple of other things. When he traced his family tree, he traced it back to this area.

And I think that was part of their story, was that they had been in this position where they were going to be slaves, but actually an ancestor of his had become pregnant and therefore was released and given a place to live.

[Risaria Langley] (16:42 - 16:44)

Oh gosh, I've never heard of this before.

[Steph Edusei] (16:44 - 17:50)

Yeah. Yeah. So quite, you know, I think, I think race and, and mixed heritage is really interesting.

I have thought about doing one of those DNA things myself, because I have seen people, it's quite interesting when some Black people do them and they suddenly find out that they're not quite as Black as they thought they were. How, how, how shocking they find that, where that's probably not going to be the case for me. I kind of know.

And you know, my mum's a redhead, if you've met my mum, I would be surprised if I haven't got some, some Norwegian or something like that in me yet. So, as I thought, we picked a lot of cards to do. I didn't think we were going to get through them all because I know what we're like, but I've really enjoyed that conversation.

Thank you. And we will have to do it again and start looking at the, the other cards as well, if that's okay with you, because I'd love to continue having these conversations. Yes.

Yes, me too. Lovely. Thank you so much for your time, Risaria.

Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed that episode of Black All Year. It would be great if you could subscribe and review, because not only will it make sure that you get the content, but it will help other people to find it too.

Take care.