As a child in a white Anglo-Irish family, Georgina Lawton’s curiosity about her dark skin colour was constantly brushed aside. Only when her father died did the truth surface
You might not think it to look at me, but my upbringing was a very Anglo-Irish affair. I grew up on the outskirts of London with my blue-eyed younger brother, British father and Irish mother. Many happy weeks of the school holidays were spent in Ireland and I was educated at a Catholic school in Surrey. We ate roast beef and yorkshire puddings on Sundays, and Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison and the Clash formed the soundtrack to our lazy weekends.
The only peculiar aspect to all this was the defining aspect of my identity. Because, although I look mixed-race, or black, my whole family is white. And until the man I called Dad died two years ago, I did not know the truth about my existence. Now, age 24, I’m starting to uncover where I come from.
When my father was dying of cancer, we briefly touched on the idea that, despite sharing the same silly sense of humour, taste in music and political interests, our DNA was probably different. Although outsiders had constantly laughed at the idea of my parents being my own, we had managed to live in a white world where race and identity were never discussed – probably because no one except me had to worry about it.
Growing up – as I imagine is the case with other white families – no one spoke about racial politics and I thought I slotted into the same cultural category as everyone else in my life. The word “black” was never uttered in reference to me. And I saw that blackness was an intangible and wholly cultural concept that had no relevance to my life. But I always had questions.
Georgina Lawton as a child with her father. Photograph: courtesy Georgina Lawton
Before he died, my father consented to giving me a DNA sample. A year later, as my grief was still casting shadows over my every move like a black cloud, I finally mustered the courage to get it processed in secret. “I know that you’re mine,” he told me a few months after his terminal diagnosis. But as the cancer slowly swallowed him, I found it impossible to press him further for the answers I had spent my life wanting. Plus, Mum told me to leave it.
When I received an email stating that the paternity test results were inconclusive, I was utterly miserable, but still hopeful that I would somehow be related to the man who had taught me how to read, cook and ride a bike, and who differed from me only in appearance. I was told by the company that the DNA of two random people differs by less than 0.1% and that I should wait in ethnicity-limbo for a few more weeks, which I did, until a test with my mother’s DNA added, proved there was no chance that my father was my own.
Rage so strong it scared me coursed through my veins and hurtled towards my mother like a hurricane in our family home as I demanded answers. After I had grown hoarse from screaming, she finally confessed to a one-night stand with a black Irishman she met in a west London pub. However, she claims that she doesn’t know anything else about him – his race included.
Growing up, unless I probed my parents, no explanation was ever given as to why I didn’t look like anyone else in my school, church or family. I was told that I had inherited my looks from a dark ancestor who had emigrated to Ireland’s west coast, years ago, I was a “genetic throwback”, or – as I distinctly remember Mum saying one time when I returned from school crying after being labelled a “paki” – I was white, like her. I was taught to be defensive towards anyone who ever questioned me. Or taught to avoid talking about race altogether. But I was fighting my parents’ battle.
It was the strangers and new acquaintances who deliberately popped my protective bubble of whiteness time and time again. In nightclub toilets, on the street, at school, they demanded to know where I was from. Was I adopted? Swapped at birth? Jamaican or Ethiopian? Their eyes often widened in surprise as I told them I identified as white; knowing smiles spread from the sides of their mouths. I was embarrassed and, with each question, I began to doubt my parents more. However, I still didn’t identify as black or mixed-race until around the age of 16 because I didn’t know anything else. And I believed what my parents told me.
Until fairly recently, I often felt isolated – but also deliberately isolated myself – from other black people. I refused to date anyone black or discuss my heritage with the many black and mixed-race girls I met who often saw my features in their own. I couldn’t relate: but, truthfully, I didn’t want to either. Whiteness is an exclusive, impenetrable concept to which I aspired because anything else was alien to me. Even though I would look in the mirror and see a brown, dark-eyed girl whose skin never burned in 30C heat and whose curls were soft and stubborn, I couldn’t identify as a black one either.
Georgina Lawton with her father. Photograph: courtesy Georgina Lawton
Overt discrimination has happened sometimes, but the feeling of “otherness” has plagued me all my life. My halcyon memories of holidays in Ireland are marred by occasional smudges. I remember my father building sandcastle forts on the beach in the rain for me and my brother, Mum singing Christy Moore in a pub and cliff walks with my cousins. But I also remember feeling ashamed to lay claim to Irishness. And sometimes, I was reminded that I wouldn’t be able to.
There was the time a group of teenagers at a village festival made monkey noises at me, and the feigned nonchalance I adopted, aged 13, after a boy turned me down for a kiss on the basis that I was “too brown”. Aged 21, I had to laugh when a barely coherent man in a Limerick nightclub asked me if I spoke English as I was just approaching the end of my degree. And as recently as six months ago, an Irishman in New York City told me I “wasn’t really Irish”.
As Irish-Nigerian writer Emma Dabiri notes: “Whiteness is ‘pure’ and doesn’t extend to brown girls, even those who can trace their Irish ancestry back to the 10th century.” It was for that reason I once turned down my mother’s offer of Irish dancing lessons.
Even though it has long been accepted that race is a social construct, it has been clear to me that many people still equate certain cultures with certain skin colours. I think my parents thought that raising me like them would mitigate my obvious difference – that my cultural identity, which I had inherited from them, could overshadow the pigmentation of my skin.
Although the relationship with my mother has sometimes been strained (I have often felt she was trying to mould my appearance into something it could never be), my father never made me feel there was any difference between us. He was a degree-holding, privately educated man and must have suspected my mum of infidelity, but they loved each other dearly and not once did any of us argue about it.
Aged nine, though, I caught sight of the box my dad ticked when asked to classify my race on a signup form for swimming lessons at our local leisure centre. Although my head barely grazed the counter, I managed to catch sight of the category he marked “prefer not to say”. “Why did you do that?” I asked later, confused at what this meant for me and my place in our family.
“Because it’s none of anyone’s business,” he said, looking a little flustered. And whenever I confided in him about a racist remark or dig, my parents repeated the same phrase and emphasised that I was loved.
My loving family maintained a collective silence over my blackness, which in turn led to all of us living in a state of denial over my own appearance, too. Years of cooing over the supposed similarities between myself and my dad were a guise to convince us all that there wasn’t a problem in our family; I wasn’t really black because I had a straight nose like my mother, I had my dad’s face shape, I wasn’t that dark. But insecurities followed me like ghosts, and, as a teenager, I ruined my natural hair and tried to change my body shape.
Growing up with an identity that never matched people’s expectations of me has been strange, isolating and nonsensical. Although I have never felt like an outsider within my own family, I often felt – and still do feel – completely alone when it comes to finding an ally against the microaggressions and subtle, insidious forms of racism that characterise the ethnic-minority experience in Britain. Grandparents on both sides, cousins, aunties, my brother … no one in my immediate community ever spoke about why I wasn’t white, which seems strange. Speaking to some of them now, they told me they had always wondered but that my race also wasn’t an issue to them.
I suppose I will always feel stuck on the threshold between two racial identities. And, as I’m currently travelling around Central America and the Caribbean, I often find my English accent and dark skin confuses people. But it’s sometimes fun to play with the ambiguity and blend in after a lifetime of standing out.
A DNA company has recently offered to help trace my ancestry and family tree, and I am waiting for the results of a personal DNA test. The idea that I may have a whole other family in the UK, Ireland or some country within the African diaspora, is both exciting and mind-blowing – but I really want to have an answer for my hair and skin colour.
I know that the man who raised me, and who I will always call Dad, would support me in the pursuit of my identity and I also have the full support of my mum, brother and dad’s family. For me, the concept of blackness has just been a box to tick on a form, or a quick-explanation to wrap up an awkward conversation, but I’m hoping that pretty soon I can accept it as an integral part of who I am.
that cover story about the dark ancestors recessive gene really worked?
