When Black is not the only colourPosted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2017-02-22 21:07Z by Steven |
When Black is not the only colour
50.50: inclusive democracy
open democracy
2017-02-20
Kamila Zahno
Haringey, London, United Kingdom
 Kamila and her ‘slightly coloured’ siblings in the 1960s. |
Too Black for the adoption agencies but not Black enough for the political campaigners. On growing up an adoptee of mixed heritage in Britain.
Times have changed. When I was a child in sixties’ Britain there was no Jessica Ennis, Jackie Kay, Chuka Umunna or Lewis Hamilton. Mixed heritage role models were thin on the ground: we saw film stars like Merle Oberon, or singers such as Bob Marley, but I can’t remember seeing any British role models. Now people of mixed parentage are everywhere, although it was not until the 2001 Census that we became ‘official’. In that year there were 677,177 of us. By 2020 it is estimated that 1.24 million people in the UK will be of mixed parentage.
In the fifties when I was born, unmarried pregnant women were encouraged to give their babies up for adoption. I, along with my three siblings, was one of them. However, the adoption agency files revealed what a headache we posed to them. We were not adoption material. ‘Baby is slightly coloured and adoption is impossible’ was the phrase written in my sister Ellen’s adoption papers.
We were all different ethnicities: our fathers from Asia or Africa, our mothers white. My mother was a young Swiss au pair working in London; my father an Indian engineering student. How they met I shall never know but I liked to think about them learning to jive at the Hammersmith Palais…
Read the entire article here.