Isabella Silvers: "I feel excluded from a community that I'm part of"

The editor on the vulnerability and limits of language, plus what she's learned from a year of Mixed Messages

Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! I’m Natalie Morris, and this week, in honour of the one-year anniversary of this newsletter, I'm speaking to award-winning journalist and founder of Mixed Messages, Isabella Silvers. Isabella has Punjabi-Indian and white-British heritage, and started the newsletter to help her unpick her complicated relationship with racial identity. Along the way, she has built quite a community and started many vital conversations. Read her story below.

---

How do you define your ethnicity?

When I was younger, the words I actually used were ‘half-caste’ – but imagine it said in my Birmingham accent! As I got to my teens, I started using ‘mixed-race’ more. The phrase ‘half-caste’ seemed to be more prominent for much longer in Birmingham and the Midlands than elsewhere in the UK, I’m not entirely sure why. Now, coming up to 29, I am consciously trying to drop the ‘race’ part and refer to myself as ‘mixed’.

To easily describe myself, I will say I’m half-Indian, half-English, but I’m not super keen on the ‘half’, ‘quarter’ percentage terminology.

izzymks

A post shared by @izzymks

What was your experience growing up mixed?

There were a lot of Asian kids at my grammar school. I remember feeling that I wanted to be seen by them. That gave me an experience of British Asian culture, but when I was younger, my family life was more about Sikh culture.

I have to recognise that the Punjabi culture I experienced was also part of African culture. My grandparents on my mum’s side are Punjabi Indian, but they grew up and were born in East Africa. A lot of their culture and their language is East African, more Swahili than Punjabi.  

I always ate my Granny’s food and heard my family speaking Punjabi – I don’t understand it completely, but I know the tone and texture of the language. My British Asian friends used to tell me that I said or spelled words wrong, and I would think they must be right and I was wrong. Now, I realise I wasn’t wrong, we just say a different word in Swahili or pronounce it a different way.

izzymks

A post shared by @izzymks

Did you ever feel a sense of insecurity in your Punjabi heritage – as though you weren’t ‘enough’?

Massively. As a joke, people would frequently call me ‘coconut’ or ‘Oreo’ or ‘Bounty’ – brown on the outside white on the inside.

Not knowing the language has always been quite a big thing, having to ask what certain words mean. I get really nervous pronouncing Punjabi words, even in my own home, and will avoid pronouncing them because I’m worried my family are going to mock the way I say it.

I don’t really listen to Bollywood music, that has just never been my type of music. I’m much more of a rock and indie girl. I don’t watch Bollywood films, don’t do traditional Indian dancing… all of these things that my British Asian friends just innately know about, I wasn’t involved. It made me almost nervous about being laughed at and criticised.

Do we need to redefine our understanding of what it means to be mixed?

I always felt left out of the mixed conversation. From my perspective, whenever people say ‘mixed’, they tend to mean someone who is Black and white. I always feel frustrated when people use the term in such a limited way. I want to tell people to stop using it to only mean Black and white, because I’m also mixed, and it feels like I’m being excluding from a community that I’m a part of.

izzymks

A post shared by @izzymks

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned over the past year of Mixed Messages?

It has been important for me to realise the number of positive things there are about being mixed. People tell me how amazing it is to have access to so many different cultures, to feel comfortable in different spaces and to have all this inbuilt empathy and curiosity.

I think the most surprising thing has been discovering that not everyone struggles with it. Not everyone goes through this ‘who am I?’ crisis. Some people are very settled in being mixed. That’s something that has bought me so much joy to see, because that’s not my experience. I’m not there yet, but I have so much hope that I will get there.

Can you sum up your mixed identity in a word?

Open. I’m open to hearing everyone's stories and listening - and not projecting kind of my thoughts onto people. I want people to tell me their own story.

Mixed Messages is one! Enter our bumper first anniversary giveaway on Instagram now – the competition closes on 5th September at 11.59pm. Next week, Isabella will be talking to Adam Nathaniel Furman. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.

---

Enjoy Mixed Messages? Support me on Ko-Fi so I can continue to grow this newsletter! Your generous donations, which can start from £3, help me pay for the transcription software needed to keep this newsletter weekly.

---

Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi Indian (by way of East Africa) and my dad is White British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.