Black like me
- Orealla Felix-Smith
- Jan 27, 2017
- 5 min read

I am mixed-raced, half Guyanese and half English. But I’ve always referred to myself as black. I probably learnt this from my mum, and I’m sure I had a conversation with her when I was younger, in which I said something like I’m only half black. But I have never been looked at as white, and I have never been treated as white. I always joke that the time when I feel most white is when I’m in a black hairdressers, but this is only because I’m rarely surrounded by so many black women that aren’t in my family, and often when I get my hair done it’s by women who don’t appear to be mixed, in other words they’re ‘more black’ than me.
When I was six I moved from London to a small town in Sussex. This town introduced me to and allowed me to get acquainted with what I’d call covert racism, but my peers and others in the town would call it ignorance or even innocence. This was a very white middle-class town. My best friend who was born and raised in this town recently told me she remembered seeing a black person at around the age five and asking her Dad why they were black. She’d never seen a black person before. So my family arrives in this town, my black mum, my white Dad, my two big sisters and my little brother. I was six, so it wasn’t like I came to my new school and realised I was now a minority but I knew something was up. When I lived in London I went to a virtually all black nursery and then a very diverse primary school, so my skin colour wasn’t significant to me until after we moved.
At my primary school there were only two black people out of about 60 in my year. I was friends with the other black girl and little did i know, it would be 11 years till I’d make another black friend. Growing up I loved Disney Channel, it was all I watched and I idolised the young women on it. With the exception of ‘That’s so Raven’, Disney Channel was pretty much full of white people, minus the odd sassy black sidekick. So my role models were white American girls with long straight hair. What could go wrong?
When I was eight or nine a friend of mine had a dress-up party and without considering the obvious flaw in my costume I turned up in a sparkly dress and blonde wig and told everyone I was dressed as Hannah Montana. I was told by my friends that I couldn’t be Hannah Montana because I was black. Then they laughed at my crappy blonde wig and we all played musical chairs and went home. I left the party without my wig, feeling embarrassed and defeated.
A few years later another friend had a celebrity party, I was pleased because this gave me a bit more freedom to find a costume that was more realistic. I racked my ten year old brains and had the really original idea to go as Beyonce. Beyonce was black but the hair was still a problem, so I got my sister to straighten my hair. After half an hour at the party it had gone from being straight to being, what my friends called, ‘puffy’.
At primary school we had a tiny pool that every class got to use for an hour a week during summer. One week we got out of the pool and all the girls were taking out their ponytails and drying their hair, I didn’t want to be left out and thought my hair wouldn’t be as thick as usual because it had just got wet. So I took out my bunches and thought nothing of it. The week after that, we went swimming again, and as I made my way back to the changing rooms my teacher stopped me and said, “Hey, don’t do with your hair what you did last week!”, then turned to the other teacher and held her hands over her head in the shape of an Afro and giggled as I walked away. By this point I was getting used to these types of comments from my peers, but hearing that from a teacher who was there to educate me and look after me was crushing. Once again I was left feeling embarrassed about being different. The teacher did apologise to me a few days later after my parents spoke to the school, I’ll always remember her telling me “I didn’t mean to offend you” and how I didn’t have the words to tell her that she didn’t just offend me, she made me hate something about myself at an age where self hatred should be a far away concept.
In the five years I was at secondary school I never once wore my hair natural despite the encouragement from my friends ‘you should wear your hair in an Afro to school! Afros are so cool’. There were a few other black girls who wore their hair natural and I quietly admired their bravery whilst also being a bystander to comments referring to them as mushroom head or saying how they smelt of coconut oil. I would speak up sometimes but by this point I’d learnt that white people didn’t like being accused of racism or to have anything to do with it. About a year and a half ago I got my hair done in box braids, it gave me so much confidence and opened me up to a world of hair opportunities that aren’t as damaging to my hair as straightening it. But it also opened up a new conversation about my hair that people seemed to really enjoy. My friends started to love suggesting new styles for me or warn me to be careful I don’t start losing my hair.
Over the years I’ve developed a massive sensitivity over my hair but also have become protective over it. It’s something very personal to me and it feels intrusive to have all these people talking to me about my hair especially when they don’t understand. A common phrase said to me by friends is ‘it’s just hair’, but to me it’s not, my hair is something i associate with my blackness; when I straightened my hair i was rejecting my blackness, and now when I nurture my hair I’m accepting and celebrating my blackness. (This is not to say that the act of straightening hair is rejecting your blackness, that’s just my experience and my reason for doing so).
If I could talk to my younger self now, I would say know your worth. Don’t be grateful when boys say they like black girls, don’t laugh when people comment on the puffiness of your hair, don’t listen to people who say you’ve got a chip on your shoulder and most importantly stop fantasising about being white and realise how beautiful it is to be black. Learn to appreciate yourself in a world that doesn’t appreciate you.
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