I was stumbling through my first semester in college when a young man approached me and asked, ‘Hey, what’s your name and what department are you in?’
I didn’t know this guy and I didn’t like his bullish tone. He had thrown the question at me like a cop trying to catch a sneaky suspect. It was as if he thought I owed him an answer.
But he caught me off guard and in a hurry, so I quickly blurted out a confession. —Are you studying Italian? he repeated with a snort that reflected both disbelief and the need for further explanation.
I shrugged, looked at my watch, and headed to my lecture. From long experience, I suspected that the problem, as far as this young black man was concerned, was that I was black, but not “black enough.”
In the mid-1970s, there were not many black students at the University of Hull. I definitely stood out, but I aroused a particularly keen curiosity in the small group of the African and Caribbean brotherhood. A lost black woman, who kept to herself, I was a wild card and they couldn’t understand me.
Shouldn’t I study sociology, economics, or politics like most other black students? Why wasn’t he hanging out with them on campus? Why was he so buttoned up?
I grew up as a biracial son of Barnardo’s who, at three, was placed in foster care with a white family in an all-white community in rural North Yorkshire. They were a loving working class family and their home and the city where they lived were my world until I was 18. But there wasn’t much room to be black.
In this small white community, my high-visibility skin color meant I was black enough for kids to call me names; Black enough that they would make fun of my springy afro hair. And, at age five, he was black enough to win first prize as a golliwog in a costume contest, without needing to shine boots.
Tina Shingler grew up as Barnardo’s biracial daughter who was placed in foster care
Tina with her daughter Phoebe, whom she had with the African-American husband she met in the United States when she was 20 years old. Tina says she wasn’t ‘black enough’ and her family treated her like a ‘novelty act’
But with little knowledge of my white biological mother and none of my black father, I had no role models to explore my black heritage.
And, to fit in, I absorbed the habits and behaviors of the working-class white people I lived with. I learned to skate and ride a bike with the other children and had fish and chips on Fridays and a roast and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays.
College may have been the first time I encountered black people who openly questioned my racial authenticity, but it wouldn’t be the last. Most surprising, however, were the encounters with white people who thought they, too, could do a better job being black than I could.
After failing my high school exams, I decided to go to Italy as an au pair while I rethought my future. There I met my Italian boyfriend, Vito, whose great passion in life was jazz music. I was an R&B girl who liked Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. The strangled screech and screech of free jazz got on my nerves.
‘How do you not understand? This is your music!’ -Vito shouted when I wasn’t moved by Miles Davis tying knots on his trumpet.
There was nothing to do. He, the white Italian, would have to teach me, the black woman, how to appreciate the daring virtuosity of Davis and John Coltrane. Listen more carefully. Lean into it more, he urged. What was happening to me? It was in my genes, right?
We were together when I returned to the UK to go to university, but we split up in my third year, at which time I was taking my year in Italy. I found myself working in a school where the children thought I was an enigma wrapped in a mystery: a black woman claiming to be British, teaching them English?
‘Can you sing like Aretha?’ asked one. I shook my head in disbelief. Instead of orienting me to English syntax in the classroom, these kids had visions of me spinning through sequins and singing a number on stage. Sure, I was black, but not in the brave way they would have liked me to be.
Tina arrives at her foster home, aged three. Born to a white mother and black father, she was placed with a white family in an all-white community in rural North Yorkshire.
Playing at home when I was five years old. To fit in, Tina absorbed the habits of the working-class white people she lived with and learned to ride a bike and skateboard with local kids.
Seven years old on a trip to the beach in Yorkshire
Back in the UK for my final exams, I started dating a Jamaican student. I noticed that the other black brothers were now looking at me approvingly. Now he was doing things right.
That said, my boyfriend told me with a cheerful smile that it was a shame he never got to meet his parents because I was too light-skinned and too British to have their approval. They expected him to be with “a proper black girl,” you know, preferably from Jamaica. Even though they live in Crewe.
We weren’t at the “meet the family” stage, but it was still hard to hear. ‘Too much. “They sound like great people,” I said with deadpan sarcasm.
Even when I married my black-American husband in my 20s while visiting the United States, I still wasn’t “black enough.” Then we had our daughter, Phoebe, and I worked in Washington DC for ten years.
But to my husband’s family in North Carolina, I was a novelty again. Cars full of family members arrived just to look at me and hear me talk.
Sometimes they used my husband as an interpreter to decipher my clipped British consonants. ‘Lord, darling, you speak so beautifully!’ exclaimed an enthralled aunt.
Another thing that set me apart from most African Americans was that I kept my hair natural. In the eighties, the afro had disappeared; Now Americans, both white and black, looked askance at my naturally curly hair. It was old-fashioned, unfashionable, and at the embassy where he worked, a black colleague suggested, it seemed “unprofessional.”
Once again, I was guilty of not conforming to standard black behaviors.
Tina says she didn’t conform to standard black behaviors. After ten years in America, she returned to the UK as a divorced single mother with her then five-year-old daughter.
In African American culture at the time, detangling natural hair was considered an essential step toward acceptability. Bowing to the pressure, I spent five hours in a salon to chemically relax my hair, but I never got used to seeing myself with straight hair and couldn’t wait for it to grow out.
I’m not alone. I’ve heard many similar stories from biracial people like me, who have found their behaviors, tastes, and lifestyles challenged for not being black enough to conform to some unwritten standard of authenticity. Celebrities and high-profile power brokers find themselves in the same line of cultural fire.
When Barack Obama became president of the United States in 2009, he had to convince the African-American establishment that he was “black enough.”
Raised by his single white mother in Hawaii and with an absent black father, what were his black credentials? How black was it exactly? “I had no idea who I was myself,” Obama says of his early years in his autobiography.
For those of us who fall somewhere in between, unraveling our identity and our place in the world can be a bewildering task. Black and white. Neither and both.
After ten years in America, I returned to the UK as a divorced single mother with my five-year-old daughter.
With an absent African-American father and a biracial British mother, growing up in the United Kingdom was not without its challenges for her either.
Now, at 40, he carries his blackness with a sense of cultural ownership that says there is more than one way to be black.
It seems to me that we are all products of our environments and experiences, and learning to embrace it all is certainly how we show our true colors.
- Hair Apparent: A Voyage Around My Roots (£20, Biteback) by Tina Shingler is available now.