Where are you REALLY from?

I grew up in Port Talbot, South Wales. It was where my mother was born, and after she endured many years of domestic violence, she left my father (thank God!) and went back home with us kids. We were a mixed-race family in a predominantly white community brought up by my mother. I was always aware that we were different, which was top of my mind from my earliest memories of growing up there.

Back then, whenever I annoyed another kid, or they just didn’t like me, or I annoyed them (I’m not professing to be an angel), the first few words out of their mouths were blacky sambo, nigger, gollywog, and by the time I was 8 or 9 paki was a firm favourite. The latter has remained the case in my adult years. Often, when someone is explaining that they like me, they express it by telling me, that they see me like them. Not so long ago, I would have been happy with this because blending in was important to me, and to be thought of as white used to make me feel good.

Whenever I get asked ‘So where are you from?’, without thinking, I say ‘Wales’. Every now and again, the follow on is, ‘Where are you really from?’, and I say ‘I’m really from Wales’. I am Welsh, and I am from Wales (a minor technicality is the fact that I was actually born in Bristol), a fact my brother relishes telling anyone who will listen.

I’m cool with being asked where I am from, but for me, it’s about how it’s being asked and its relevance to the particular situation I’m in at the time. And sometimes, I just get really pissed off with having to explain my origins because of the colour of my skin.

When and how I share the origin of my skin colour and my family history is up to me. Where I am from has no bearing on my appearance or the colour of my skin – why should it?

I am Welsh, and I am from Wales.