These lines are like journeys
This post is part of an on-going series of reflections for a commission from The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. You can read all the posts here. You can view the final images here.
After I started reflecting on my experiences of racism for this commission I experienced an unpleasant but entirely common and familiar racial incident in central London. Outside a bar someone began asking me where I was from. I already knew where this was heading. I told them my place of birth in Essex. I was immediately harangued because it wasn't good enough or what he wanted to hear. What he really wanted to know is why I am brown. When I kept asserting that I was British he couldn't allow it because I didn't "look British". The situation escalated and I ended up walking away. The incident really shook me for days afterwards. Whilst it hadn’t escalated into a physical altercation these incidents of intimidation and constant questioning (and disbelieving my truth) are still forms of racial abuse. It stirred up my anxiety because apparently just going about your business on a Saturday evening is an invitation to having your identity questioned.
These micro aggressions of asking things like "where are you really from?” simply serve to indicate to me that you do not belong here, when I was born and raised in this country. Because I am mixed race I look like I am from so many places but belong to no where. I am asked in shops, cafes and streets where I am from, yet when I tell them my heritage it is met with confusion. When we are away on holiday I could be Spanish, Turkish, Brazilian, Romanian, Mexican. To strangers I am from everywhere and yet no where. Some people ask with genuine curiosity whilst others use this as a way to indicate that I am different from them, that I do not belong here. I belong here.
Recently I was listening to Janelle Monae on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast. It was at a time when I was feeling really tired of having to explain to people why doing this kind of work can be so draining. The endless emotional labour of helping others recognise why the way in which they act means that they can be complicit in discrimination. Janelle is specifically talking about the burden that black women have, but it’s a very relatable.
“I used to be like yeah, black women are superheroes, but I don’t like that. I don’t like that we are looked at as people who have to fix everything all the time. It shouldn’t be our job. It should be white folks, dealing with their past, reckoning with what the majority of their ancestors started.”
I've continued drawing: where does one line begin, where does another end? Will they or do they overlap? I'd mostly been experimenting with drawing on white paper but recently decided to invert it. The process of drawing seems to keep my mind still, for a while at least. It's like I'm untangling a maze, a web of history and experiences that are amassed from over 36 years. I’ve been thinking a lot about the journeys we take that intersect with racism: the discovery and reckoning with colonialism, the history that brought us here, down to the every day acceptance and battles we face in being recognised and valued.
I think for a long time I rejected labels because they were used against me. My sibling very clearly identifies as a black man, whilst I never did. In the same way that being queer was never a dominant label in my life. It is a part of who I am, but not the sole way I am willing to be identified. I live with a disability but again, being disabled isn’t a primary identifier for me. When you intersect the three — being brown, queer, with a disability — it can sometimes be used as even more ammunition to be marginalised. Lately I've been thinking that it isn't a way to marginalise me anymore. My intersecting identities are to be proud of: my melanin, my queerness, the difference in how my brain works.
The main thing that I took away from the aforementioned experience is just how difficult someone can find it to be around someone whose skin is simply a different colour. Not that I had behaved in a way that warranted interrogation, but that whilst his skin was white and mine brown, that I am different and foreign to him. Yesterday I started with just that — photographs of my skin — and begun to digitally draw across images. These lines are like journeys, from one side of something to another, which is how it feels doing this commission. I’m journeying across quite difficult terrain, asking myself questions that will be posed to others in a building where so many people (patients & clinicians) pass through.
