Raven Smith: “I can’t live under the worry that the world is against me”
The author and columnist on his assured identity, never outgrowing social biases and cultural whiteness
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author and columnist Raven Smith, who is of mixed Jamaican and white British heritage. Raven is a Vogue columnist and the author of Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits and Raven Smith’s Men, both full of insightful cultural commentary and Raven’s trademark incisive wit. I was excited to speak to Raven after reading his powerful article in The Guardian, titled ‘My dad said I wasn’t black enough. At last, I know what he meant.’ Read more of Raven’s story below.
How do you define your racial background?
Mixed-race. My dad is Jamaican and moved to Brixton when he was 11. My mum is from North London.
I grew up in Brighton – my mum was looking for ethnically diverse places [to live] outside of London, so it was Brighton or Birmingham. She worried a lot about whether leaving Brixton was the right thing to do, but I think it was. Sticking out like a sore thumb with my ethnicity in a predominantly white school was good for me rather than being another face in the crowd.
Growing up with a white mum and an absent dad, my identity was always under scrutiny. I think all those questions solidified it from a young age. I never had that ‘who am I’ when I was in my teens, I was quite sure early on.
Has that sureness stayed consistent for you?
My mum said ‘I always knew there was something different about you and I assumed it was because you were mixed race,’ then I came out. I was really myself for my whole childhood – gregarious, love a chat, sociable, then I realised I was gay and that drove me back into myself.
Because my parents weren’t together, my two sides weren’t in opposition. My relationship with my dad is tied up in my Blackness, masculinity and sexuality, but it's something to go and visit on a Sunday. It’s not a constant thing, it was a day trip to existential crisis.
Is this where this sense of being culturally white comes in?
I've been brought up by a white woman on her own and experienced her cultural references in the way she has lived and her values in terms of parenting. My dad would call my mum a headless chicken, and she would agree. My dad is much more laid back and traditionally Jamaican.
My dad was telling me to be Blacker, my mum wanted me to be whatever I wanted. I didn’t fulfil my dad’s expectations of being a young Black person and I think that’s about his lack of influence in my life in all aspects, not just race. He is someone who experienced so much racism in Britain in the ‘80s. To have been constantly under racial siege his whole life, you don’t get to the millennium and feel like something's lifted. You wear it heavily forever.
My dad would say to me that mixed-race kids are the angriest because Black kids know where they’re at, mixed-race kids are in this battle. But I can’t live under the worry that the world is against me, and that comes from a really sturdy, foundational understanding of what I'm about from a really young age.
Being culturally white has a lot of privileges. Because I’ve got brown skin, people have an expectation of what I'm going to be like the second I walk in the room. There’s no way on earth that I ever lived a white life, it’s impossible. That is the first thing people see about me and there's no point in pretending that they don't have a load of assumptions. People don’t think I’m educated, so sometimes I like to dispel them.
Did you ever speak to your parents about being mixed specifically?
Not that I recall. I think she overcompensated in the best way as a white mother to a brown child. She’s one of the three founding members of Mosaic, a Black and mixed-parentage family group in Brighton, so instead of having awkward conversations about race, she just put me in diverse spaces. Race was never not discussable.
Are there any narratives around mixed identity that you want to address?
I’m tall, gay and Black, and these are just things that I am. They don’t define me. Now that I'm into my 30s, I’ve become much more aware of the cultural significance of those things. I am tall in a tall world, I’m a man in a man’s world, I’m part-white in white supremacy. I have privileges, but I’m still just a Black guy when I walk into a room, I still get followed around a shop if I’m wearing a hoodie.
I can’t outgrow the biases and the system is not going to change in my lifetime. When Obama is standing in the senate, that’s not a half-white guy people are looking at.
‘Can Black people be racist to white people’ is a question I consider all the time, because racism is not about the colour of somebody’s skin, it’s long term systematic disenfranchisement. If I say something about a white person, which I’m not about to, that’s punching up. Racism is a global oppressive system. 50% of my family benefitted from that and 50% of my family are victims of that.
What’s the best thing about being mixed for you?
A much broader worldview. A sense of self from a very young age which has led to me trusting my instincts much earlier in my life than I think I would have otherwise.
How would you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Excellent. Essentially good. This is how I operate, I can’t focus too much on the negatives.
Buy Raven Smith’s Men via Bookshop and Amazon. Are you coming to Mixed Messages Live? Book your tickets here! Next week, I’ll be speaking to chef Ayesha Kalaji. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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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.
It’s an interesting read, as I am from the same background and struggled with my identity. But it was a different time it was the mid 50’s, 60’s & 70’s. Things were a lot worse then, as my family lived in a town mostly with travelling/ Romany backgrounds. I was more accepted by these people than black people of a similar age. They pushed me away as I was not black they didn’t want to associate with me, very sad so reading that story was interesting. In fact I have written a book relating to this, that goes live on Amazon in a few weeks.