‘We now feel proud to be mixed’: the blessings and biases of being biracial
‘We are now open to being loud about our mixed identity’: Nicole Ocran and Emma Slade Edmondson. Photograph: Phill Taylor
Emma Slade Edmondson and Nicole Ocran are doing what they do best: riffing. Theirs is a comfortable, free-flowing conversational volleying, the result of countless hours spent together recording their award-winning podcast, Mixed Up. Ocran is logging in to our interview from her bedroom in Croydon; fellow Londoner Slade Edmondson from Paris. After brief introductions, they quickly find their rhythm, talking – as they so often do together – about the experience of being mixed race.
“I came to the podcast totally unsure of myself,” Ocran is explaining, by way of introduction. Her co-host nods in agreement. “I was sensitive to other people’s reactions towards me and worried about what I could or should say and where. It was such a rare thing for me to open up about being mixed. So often, in the spaces I’m in, it’s met with some pushback, judgment or dismissal.”
This is a sensation, both feel, that’s common among those who define as biracial in Britain today. It’s why they started their podcast four years ago – an exploration of mixed-race identities. Guests to date include Mel B, actor David Oyelowo, and former footballer Anton Ferdinand. Published this month, their book, The Half of It, provides further room to explore a range of subjects from dating to beauty standards, fetishisation and an examination of the phrase “white passing”. They trace anti-mixed racism across continents and centuries – a history that for most remains entirely unknown. “Through all of this writing, talking and research,” Ocran says, “I’ve found myself feeling far prouder; open to being loud about my mixed identity. At times, for us – and our guests – recordings have felt more like group therapy. It’s an intrinsic and intimate part of my life that I wasn’t sharing or speaking about… until now.”
It was such a rare thing for me to open up about being mixed. So often it’s met with pushback, judgment or dismissal
Ocran and Slade Edmondson are both in their mid-30s. Prior to podcasting, the pair moved in similar circles: Ocran is a writer and fashion influencer; Slade Edmondson a consultant within the sustainability and ethics space. In 2019 they briefly crossed paths at a panel event. “A few weeks later,” says Ocran, “we started talking on Instagram.” Both were then living in south London, so they arranged to meet. “We sat down for a drink in Brixton, talked for hours, and barely touched on the work project we’d agreed to discuss.”
Conversation was instantaneous and instinctive; much of it, for both, entirely uncharted territory. “The topic of being mixed race came up straight away and repeatedly,” Ocran continues. Slade Edmondson takes over: “Neither of us had previously had the opportunity to talk about the experience of being mixed race with such openness and no judgment. I’d never felt anything like it. She’s American; I’m British, but so many of the nuances of what we’d been through were the same. There was a kinship. Validation, almost, of all these things you just don’t really talk about.”
This was four years ago; pre-pandemic. They talked, semi-seriously, about the potential of a podcast focused on the mixed experience. In lockdown, they figured: “Why not give it a go?”
Booking big guests, they say, has never proved a problem. “When we approach celebrities or personalities, they often say: ‘I’ve been waiting forever for someone to ask me these questions. Nobody ever has before. Of course I’m coming.’ Some have said it’s one of the most important interviews they’ll do.”
“Nicole and I bonded from the outset over growing up in predominantly white environments,” Slade Edmondson says. “I was raised in Bushey, just outside Watford in Hertfordshire. Very leafy, very suburban, very white. My mum was a single mum when she had me. She’s white; my Jamaican father isn’t. Back then it was frowned upon to have a baby out of wedlock. And for a white woman having a brown baby…” Her birth parents didn’t stay together. “Then Mum met my dad – the man who bought me up – when I was three. He’s white and northern. I have two brothers, both white with blue/green eyes and blond-brown hair. Basically, I grew up in a white family in the suburbs. I went to a very white school. I had to find my own way to the cultural connections and heritage connections that I wanted to make myself.”
Ocran grew up in Alexandria, Virgina. “It’s a short drive,” she clarifies, “to Washington DC. My dad is from Ghana, my mum is from the Philippines. I was raised predominantly around my mums’s sisters who all lived close by. I’m an only child and went to a predominately white Catholic school.”
When you’re young, you don’t have the tools to handle that stuff. I’d have people ask me if I was adopted
Both speak of, from an early age, having their identities interrogated and quizzed. “And when you’re young,” Slade Edmondson continues, “you don’t have the tools to handle that stuff. I’d have people ask me if I was adopted. My brothers would be questioned: ‘Why is your sister brown or black? What happened?’ You learn to steer away from these conversations, or to shut them down.” Often, she feels, inquisitors weren’t interested in a nuanced response. “People ask you the question, but don’t ask you how you’d like to be identified. Your short response sees you labelled by the asker. It’s othering. After all our episodes and conversations, we’ve found this is a common theme for mixed people. You feel you’re instantly being labelled, but rarely are you asked how you identify or describe your own identity.” Ocran is nodding in agreement: “When you’re mixed, people are always trying to suss you out, so they can explain to themselves who you are.”
Ocran is an only child. Slade Edmondson’s siblings weren’t racialised in the same way as she was. For both, navigating their mixed-ness, through their early years at least, was a solo endeavour. As is often the case, neither of their respective parents were mixed, unlike their children. There’s no shared history or identity to be easily handed down. Mixed people, meanwhile, are often diverse and disparate. It was a struggle to find sources of information and community.
In adulthood, they continued to see these dialogues muted. “There are lots of reasons why you might not feel it’s appropriate to talk about your mixed-ness,” Slade Edmondson believes. “There’s a censorship that happens. When you’re mixed, belonging to more than one community or culture – your heritage isn’t quite as simple. You have allegiances and commitments to different heritage groups. Sometimes they’re conflicting. You don’t necessarily feel you have the freedom to talk about being mixed over, say, the experience of someone who is not.”
This constant negotiation, she explains, stops you freely sharing. “And we know a lot of judgment comes with sharing experiences of being mixed. You only have to look online to see it. There’s so much scathing rhetoric about mixed people: that everything is about us. That beige tears don’t matter. That we’re only privileged. The idea that we take up too much space already. That we talk too much and are too visible. When actually – we’ve done hundreds of hours of interviews and research – it’s just not the case. Yes, we are the fastest growing demographic in both the UK and US, but actually the depth of our stories, and a serious discussion of our experiences, doesn’t exist in popular culture.”
What representation there is, both feel, is too often shallow and narrowly defined. Take, for instance, our presumption of what it means to be mixed race. “The spectrum is so broad,” says Slade Edmondson, “but in the UK we have this idea that to be mixed race is a black and white mix. Obviously, that’s a silly stereotype. An assumption. The stories that get told are so limited by that perception.”
In writing The Half of It, its authors were afforded space to research mixed histories in greater depth. “All over the world there are stories of mixed-race people and communities that have experienced displacement or brutality,” they write. “Babies orphaned from the 1920s to the 1950s, because of the UK’s policy against the adoption of mixed-heritage children; the Métis in Senegal, a people created by design by the French aristocracy; people who are called ‘coloured’ in South Africa; mulattos in Spain; creoles and mestizos in the US; and the Aboriginal Stolen Generations in Australia.” Once you start to dig, they realised, the list goes on.
“I knew very little of this history,” Ocran admits. “I knew of the ‘tragic Mullatto trope’: in early-19th century American literature, a character who was mixed black and white was often presented as depressed, suicidal and reckless. And of the ‘one-drop rule’ [the notion preached by white supremacists in America’s southern states that having one Black ancestor saw you defined as Black under segregation], but that was all I knew.”
Together, Ocran and Slade Edmondson learned about the relentless brutality suffered by mixed-race children at the hands of Mother and Baby Institutions in the Republic of Ireland that only shut their doors as recently as the late-1990s; how more than 200,000 children were sent abroad to the United States, Europe and Australia in the six decades that followed the Korean war, of whom over 40,000 were mixed. During that time, Korean president Syngman Rhee reportedly referred to mixed children as “refuse” that the country needed to rid itself of. In June 1930, the Daily Telegraph printed a piece declaring mixed children to be a “social menace”.
“Most of us don’t know these stories,” says Slade Edmondson. “Stories of babies being stolen, kidnapped, abducted or forced from their families in so many places all over the world. People don’t know about the discourse dictating mixed children were the scourge of the earth, who had set society back. That they were defective. Monstrous. It’s a campaign you can trace from place to place that’s about discouraging migration, racial mixing and multiculturalism. You can see how mixed babies and children were used as pawns, a device to push that message. To discourage people from having babies who looked like us in the first place. We wanted our book to connect all these dots.”
Slade Edmondson and Ocran hope their podcast and book will help kickstart a wider reckoning with our ignorance of mixed-race histories and their modern representation. “We’re coming from a very low base level,” Ocran says. “The mixed experience is barely understood or discussed. Lots of questions in the book are left unanswered. We’re so early on here. The book is really to open a dialogue. I still don’t feel there’s a rigorous mainstream conversation that is engaging with the mixed-race experience. My hope is that now, at last, it can start.”
Mixing it up: history and hope in an extract from The Half of It
Over the past few years while recording Mixed Up and writing this book, we have always found ourselves circling back to the idea that we have to know the history in order to more clearly understand and discuss the present, and certainly before we can chart our future.
Having spoken on the podcast to more than 100 people from different corners of the world about their lived experiences, we have learned details of cultural histories that we were unaware of. This history has compelled us to research further and seek out these stories and their backgrounds.
We spoke to Rosemary Adaser, founder of the Association of Mixed-race Irish, about the relentless brutality suffered by mixed-race children at the hands of Mother and Baby Institutions in the Republic of Ireland that only shut their doors as recently as the late 1990s, about how ultimately if you were mixed-race Irish you were viewed as a scourge upon the nation.
We spoke to Florence Kollie Raja about what it means to have lived through two civil wars, having fled from Liberia to Ukraine as a child, and now, again, how the Russo–Ukraine War has affected her as a Black Ukrainian – a mix that she tells us some people would find hard to believe exists.
All over the world there are stories of mixed-race people and communities that have experienced displacement or brutality: babies orphaned from the 1920s to the 1950s because of the UK’s policy against the adoption of mixed-heritage babies; the Métis in Senegal, a people created by design by the French aristocracy; people who are called ‘coloured’ in South Africa; mulattos in Spain; creoles and mestizos in the US; and the Aborigine Stolen Generations in Australia. Once you start to dig, the list goes on.
Although we mixed-race people have existed throughout history, there is still an unspoken misrepresentation and a wilful misunderstanding of our existence, which we feel in not being able to discuss the history of prejudice, segregation and, ultimately, violence.
In the 1930s, social researcher Muriel E Fletcher wrote the Fletcher Report, on behalf of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half- Caste Children, which described great moral concern over the fear of mixed-race babies being born in their hundreds and thousands just before African American servicemen arrived at Britain’s ports in the following decade.
It was anticipated that mixed-race children would be the scourge of Britain and eugenics theories declared that our existence would be doomed because we would inherit the worst traits of our parents – inherent physical and mental defects. We were deemed to be neither one nor the other, but decidedly worse than both. Given that, at this time, to be ‘other’ – Black, or indeed any other ethnic minority – would have carried with it a characterization that was ‘less than human’ (something, incidentally, that is still written into the American Constitution to this day), it is not difficult to imagine that mixed-race babies were thought of as monstrous.
However, we also discovered secret communities formed of people who were all known by the same ugly label, ‘half-caste’, and heard stories of a dive bar called the Reno, in 1970s Moss Side, Manchester, where they hung out and mixed-race children were all but conceived when their parents met on the dancefloor.
It’s interesting that as we researched the history of mixed-race people, clandestine, hidden records and suppressed lived experiences cropped up again and again.
The Half of It: Exploring the Mixed-Race Experience by Emma Slade Edmondson and Nicole Ocran is published by William Collins on 4 July at £20