{"id":61641,"date":"2021-09-28T01:40:10","date_gmt":"2021-09-28T01:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61641"},"modified":"2021-10-04T19:57:58","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T19:57:58","slug":"bernardine-evaristo-on-a-childhood-shaped-by-racism-i-was-never-going-to-give-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61641","title":{"rendered":"Bernardine Evaristo on a childhood shaped by racism: \u2018I was never going to give up\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bernardine Evaristo on a childhood shaped by racism: \u2018I was never going to give up\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
2021-09-25<\/p>\n

Bernardine Evaristo<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
Bernardine Evaristo<\/a>: \u2018I liked the same music as my little white pals, ate the same food, had the same feelings \u2013 human ones.\u2019 Photograph: Suki Dhanda\/The Observer<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn\u2019t accept defeat<\/em><\/p>\n

When I won the Booker prize<\/a> in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other<\/em><\/a>, I became an \u201covernight success\u201d, after 40 years working professionally in the arts. My career hadn\u2019t been without its achievements and recognition, but I wasn\u2019t widely known. The novel received the kind of attention I had long desired for my work. In countless interviews, I found myself discussing my route to reaching this high point after so long. I reflected that my creativity could be traced back to my early years, cultural background and the influences that have shaped my life. Not least, my heritage and childhood<\/p>\n

Through my father, a Nigerian immigrant who had sailed into the Motherland on the \u201cGood Ship Empire<\/a>\u201d in 1949, I inherited a skin colour that defined how I was perceived in the country into which I was born, that is, as a foreigner, outsider, alien. I was born in 1959 in Eltham<\/a> and raised in Woolwich<\/a>, both in south London<\/a>. Back then, it was still legal to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin, and it would be many years before the Race Relations Acts (1965<\/a> and 1968<\/a>) enshrined the full scope of anti-racist doctrine into British law.<\/p>\n

My English mother met my father at a Commonwealth<\/a> dance in central London<\/a> in 1954. She was studying to be a teacher at a Catholic teacher-training college run by nuns in Kensington<\/a>; he was training to be a welder. They married and had eight children in 10 years. Growing up, I was labelled \u201chalf-caste<\/a>\u201d, the term for biracial people at that time…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn\u2019t accept defeat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,1245,8,10],"tags":[1345,81,850,2103],"class_list":["post-61641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-bernardine-evaristo","tag-england","tag-london","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61726,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61641\/revisions\/61726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}