Mixed Up: ‘Racism made me feel sub-human. I used to pretend to be anything but black’Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2019-03-29 02:25Z by Steven |
Mixed Up: ‘Racism made me feel sub-human. I used to pretend to be anything but black’
METRO.co.uk
2019-03-20
Natalie Morris, Senior lifestyle Writer
(Picture by Jerry Syder for Metro.co.uk)
Welcome to Mixed Up, a series that aims to elevate the under-heard narratives of mixed-race people…
…Billie Dee Gianfrancesco is half white and half black Caribbean.
She spent her childhood hating and denying her blackness, until a total breakdown in her mid 20s forced her to reassess her identity.
‘My mother was born in Hackney in London, my grandmother was a part of the Windrush generation and came to London from Dominica to be an NHS nurse,’ Billie tells Metro.co.uk.
‘We aren’t sure who my grandfather is or where he came from, but DNA tests show that he was black and that he probably came from somewhere in the Caribbean.
‘My father is white Australian, and I was born in Sydney. My parents divorced when I was five and I moved to Norfolk in the UK in 1998 when I was eight, with my mother, Italian-Australian step-dad, and younger sister.
‘I spent my entire life, up until the last few years, really struggling with my identity.’…
Read the entire article here.