Miquita Oliver: “I was so scared about how Black I was that I forgot I was white”
The presenter on her ancestry, finding joy in pain and the history of ‘half-caste’
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m so excited to be speaking to presenter Miquita Oliver, who I grew up watching on T4. Since then, Miquita has been a regular presence on TV screens, appearing on Celebrity Gogglebox with her mum, Andi Oliver. The duo also teamed up for The Caribbean with Andi and Miquita, a moving two-part series that sees Miquita and Andi explore their roots. My conversation with Miquita was deep, thought-provoking and revelatory – read her story below.
To start, tell me a bit about your racial background.
My mum’s Antiguan and my dad’s Scottish, white with red hair. To be mixed-race in Ladbroke Grove in the late ‘80s was not a big deal. All my friends are mixed-race. My mum had come from Suffolk, where she was the only Black woman in ‘70s East Anglia. Her whole life she was hugely racially abused, verbally. I didn’t have that at all. I was in a place where it was the norm, sometimes the majority, which I know now is very unusual.
What I did experience was the difference between the ways Black girls would react to me as opposed to white girls and dark-skinned Black girls. It was based on hair. I always had long curly plaits and it singled me out and made me a threat. The way dark women feel about mixed-race Black and white women is not from them, it’s because the world tells you that there is no space for you in the sector of being fancied and desirable over a Black and white mixed-race woman. All you have to do is watch music videos, the love interest is always a light-skin woman. It’s ridiculous.
I didn’t really find out about my Blackness and my whiteness until… last year? And I’m 38. I feel like I’m at the beginning of finding out what it really means to be both of those things, and the specifics of those things. Not just Black and white – Antiguan and Scottish. Celtic and Caribbean. Taking it away from a visual thing and an aesthetic back to an ancestral theme of where I come from.
Did you ever talk to your mum about being mixed?
No, because the environment I was brought into was so creative – Portobello and musicians, different races, generations and classes. We didn’t talk about being mixed-race because it was pretty uninteresting.
[My mum] would just say “I hate Suffolk, I never want to go back.” When my uncle passed away when I was very young, we started getting sent to Suffolk. That’s when I first encountered racism, I was like “what the fuck is this?” I didn’t get it. I think we were nine and going to the swimming pools, and me and my cousin got called coons. It was more the venom, I’d never encountered it. Now, it’s that deep wet feeling of familiarity.
My mum and I are very well known now. You get a bit lost in that, where everyone is happy to see you. But recently in Essex I asked to use the bathroom in a snooker hall and the woman was so rude to me. I thought “what is that? Oh, it’s racism.” There’s these puddles of it, and when you step in it, it’s really old and familiar.
It makes me think about what my mum and grandmother went through, and what that means if you go back. When my mum and I went to the Caribbean last year, I thought I’d come back feeling really Antiguan in my bones. I’m obviously not Antiguan, that’s just where my African ancestors were taken. Academically, you know that, but emotionally, I’ve never thought about what that means. When we did the DNA test and found out we were Nigerian, I was like “fuck,” not even just African, that’s a very vague broad term. I just saw people, people, people, back, back, back – I got very overwhelmed. I felt like I was at the beginning of a huge story about this small sentence of being mixed-race. Really it doesn’t even kind of cover who you are and where you’re from.
We connect to our cultures very tangibly through music, art and food – how have you connected to your heritage, and are there any intangible ways too?
My dad’s mum is very Scottish, she’s just come back into my life. I was like, “this is my grandma.” I couldn’t get my head around it. Because I’ve been focused on fixing my relationship with my dad, I never really thought about his mum being my grandma. It was just a trip, it opened up this whole thing of “I’m Celtic.”
When you were saying that you don’t connect to your white side because of racism – that feels very exterior. That’s what they do. The way I leaned into my white side when I was younger was to be white. The thing is, I am white! I was so scared about how Black I was that I forgot I was white, that the only time I felt empowered by being mixed-race was to figure out the white side of me as much as the other side that is visually important to people. Finding out what being half-white means ancestrally and in your lineage, that’s huge for me. I’m now obsessed with going to Scotlands and the islands and finding out about our clan. According to the DNA test, I’m more Scottish than anything else.
Do you like the term mixed-race, or have you struggled with language throughout your life?
I used to say half-caste, my mum would tell me off. I was like “What is the big deal” but can you imagine how hard that was hearing a nine year old using the word ‘half-caste’ now that we know what it really means. It was the difference between being raped, killed, survived, living you know, it’s not a joke. I didn’t want to start saying something different to everyone else in school, so that was a tricky time for mum and I.
What’s one of the best things about being mixed-race?
My mum and I were watching Kendrick at Glastonbury and she said “sometimes it just feels good to be Black doesn’t it?” But also, when my dad tells me things about Scotland, I’m like “God, that’s mine as well.”
The great thing about being mixed-race is that there are two massive lineages that are all yours, and you get to mix them. I honestly would not want to be any other way now and that has taken me a long time to get there. It feels so right and so good to know all that I know and know that there's so much more to come.
What are the parts of you that you think come from being mixed?
In the Caribbean, they say something like “I like her hand.” They don’t say they “I like the way she cooks.” I really like my hand, the way I am, in a way that I know is from my grandmother, which is because of the women she’s from and what they’ve been through.
I think my passion, fire and drive is probably from what my ancestors went through. It changed my intent. It made me want to do things because I’m Caribbean, not in spite of. My ancestors found joy and passion in the face of complete and utter terror, and that’s what being Black is. You have some serious fucking pain and I think I experience joy in a way that Caribbean people do. We come together through food and music and art like you were saying, and that’s because those things kept us alive. That’s why we feel music differently.
The Celtic side, I don’t even know what’s going on over there. I just think it's so exciting now to keep looking at all the different ways that they make me who I am.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Growth. The way I’ve felt about my race has always felt quite stagnant. Now what I’ve realised is that every stage of my life has been growth in my identity and what that really means.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (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.
Loved this. If you haven't read it already, I'd really recommend Bernardine Evaristo's memoir Manifesto – she writes beautifully about her own heritage on both sides of her family, and how complex it is, and how stupid the idea is that anyone is 'indigenous'. She would be amazing for a future newsletter.