Hovis. The Best Of Both.

This is the first time I have blogged about a topic on request, but it is a topic that is of genuine interest to me and one which raises several questions.

What is life like being mixed race?  It’s great, I love it, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.  But, wouldn’t a white, black, brown, yellow or green person say exactly the same thing?  Surely not many people wish they were a different race?  In my experience people tend to accept who they are and the attributes they have been brought into the world with.  You can be jealous of individuals sure, but not of an entire race right?  People are who they are.

My background.  My dad’s family are Dominican and my mum’s Italian.  Unfortunately I haven’t yet had the pleasure of visiting Dominica, but I have been to Italy countless times and love the place.  I live with my mum and spend a considerably greater amount of time with her than I do with my dad.  Yet if someone was to ask me to describe myself as either black or white I would most likely say black.  To me that seems strange.  Why black?  Why not white?  I guess it’s simply because of the colour of my skin and how much that influences everything society.  To society I am black because my skin is brown.  Simple as.

There is a strange deep-rooted view in society that a white face is the starting point for human creation and that anything else is a deviation.  Race is treated like adding fruit squash to a glass of water, as soon as the first drop hits the water it becomes something else, no longer pure water.  In fact that is not how it works at all.  We don’t start as anything, white, black or anything else.  We are all unique blends of our parents and that should be appreciated and respected in it’s own right.  I embrace both my cultures as much as possible and would never ignore or disregard part of my make-up.  It’s my belief that at some stage in human development there will be a time where there are no longer strict races, and all people will end up being mixed.  This will go a long way to stopping much of the violence across the world and creating an overall better harmony in society.

To me, being born with parents from different cultures was a blessing.  I gained two sets of beliefs, traditions, and experiences.  It is harder to be labeled and put in a box.  But the thing I love most about being mixed race is, in my opinion, the way in which you can interact with diverse groups of people, from all different races.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one group of my friends are predominantly white and another predominantly black yet I find it easy to fit into both.  That’s not to say that only mixed race people can socializes across cultures of course because that’s not true at all.  I just mean that having a racial/cultural bond with both groups, subconsciously perhaps, allows me to fit in without much difficulty, the same is true when meeting new people.  I would be interested to hear from different people to hear about there experiences.

I'd be really interested to hear what you think?

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Signing off.

Hovis ‘The Best Of Both’