“Neither you or Dad taught me about my identity. I just know one side of it. You brought me up just knowing about the white side of it”.
As a parent, shocked at the prospect of not being able to correct what I was unaware of as being an issue, was hard.
I replied with “What do you mean?”
I respected my 19 years old son’s calm demeanour but was shocked by the amount of truth in his statement. I couldn’t give him a stable coherent answer. Perhaps my own denial throughout the years contributed to my son’s conclusion about who he is.
You see, back in 2001, when my son would have been just two years of age, he was one of around just 660,000 mixed race people in the UK. Reflecting back, I wonder how many questioned their identities.