TINA SHINGLER: I've been seen as a 'novelty' all my life. Here's the surprising truth about why I've never felt accepted
I was stumbling around in my first term at university when a young man approached me, demanding: ‘Hey, what’s your name and what department are you in?’
I didn’t know this guy, and I didn’t like his bullish tone. He’d fired the question at me like a policeman trying to nail a shifty suspect. It was as if he thought I owed him an answer.
But he’d caught me off guard and in a hurry, so I quickly blurted a confession. ‘You’re studying Italian?’ he repeated with a snort that registered both disbelief and the need for further explanation.
I shrugged, glanced at my watch and skidded off to my lecture. From long experience, I suspected that the problem, as far as this young black man was concerned, was that I was black – but not ‘black enough’.
Back in the mid-Seventies, there weren’t many black students at Hull University. I definitely stood out, but for the small clique of the African and Caribbean brotherhood, I aroused a particularly keen curiosity. A stray black female, who kept herself to herself, I was a wild card and they couldn’t fathom me.
Shouldn’t I be studying sociology, economics or politics like most of the other black students? Why wasn’t I hanging out with them on campus? Why was I so buttoned down?
I’d grown up as a biracial Barnardo’s child who, aged three, was put into foster care with a white family in an all-white community in rural North Yorkshire. They were a caring, working-class family and their home and the town where they lived was my world until I was 18. But there hadn’t been much room for being black.
In this small white community, my hi-vis skin colour meant I was black enough for kids to call me names; black enough for them to make fun of my springy afro hair. And, at five, I was black enough to win first prize as a golliwog in a fancy dress competition – no boot polish required.
Tina Shingler grew up as a biracial Barnardo's child who was put into foster care
Tina with daughter Phoebe, whom she had with the Black-American husband she met in the US in her 20s. Tina says she wasn't 'black enough' and was treated like a 'novelty act' by his family
But with little knowledge of my white birth mother and none of my black father, I had no role models for exploring my black heritage.
And, in order to fit in, I absorbed the habits and behaviours of the white working-class people I lived with. I learned to roller skate and ride a bike with the other kids and there was fish and chips on Fridays and a roast with Yorkshire pudding on Sundays.
University may have been the first time I encountered black people openly questioning my racial authenticity, but it wouldn’t be the last. More surprisingly, though, were the encounters with white people who thought they could make a better job of being black than me, too.
After failing my A-levels, I decided to go to Italy as an au pair while I re-thought my future. There I met my Italian boyfriend, Vito, whose big passion in life was jazz music. I was an R&B gal with a liking for Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. The strangled squeak and squeal of free jazz set my nerves on edge.
‘How do you not get it? This is your music!’ cried Vito when I was unmoved by Miles Davis tying a tune in knots on the trumpet.
There was nothing for it. He, the white Italian guy, would have to teach me, the black woman, how to appreciate the daring virtuosity of Davis and John Coltrane. Listen more carefully. Lean into it harder, he urged. What was wrong with me; it was in my genes, wasn’t it?
We were together when I returned to the UK for university but we split in my third year – by which time I was taking my year out in Italy. I found myself working in a school where the kids thought I was an enigma wrapped in a mystery: a black woman who claimed to be British, who was teaching them English?
‘Can you sing like Aretha?’ asked one. I shook my head in disbelief. Rather than picking my way around English syntax in the classroom, these children had visions of me gyrating in sequins and belting out a number on stage. Sure, I was black, but not in the gutsy way they would have liked me to be.
Tina arriving at her foster home, aged three. Born to a white mother and black father, she was placed with a white family in an all-white community in rural North Yorkshire
Playing at home as a five year old. In order to fit in, Tina absorbed the habits of the white working-class people she lived with, learning to ride a bike and roller skate with local children
Aged seven on a seaside trip in Yorkshire
Back in the UK for my finals, I began dating a Jamaican student. I noticed the other black brothers now looked on me with approval. Now I was doing things right.
That said, my boyfriend told me with a light-hearted chuckle that it was a shame I would never get to meet his parents because I was too light skinned, too British to meet with their approval. They expected him to be with ‘a proper black girl’, you know, preferably from Jamaica. Despite them living in Crewe.
We weren’t at the ‘meet the family’ stage, but it was still hard to hear. ‘Too bad. They sound like terrific people,’ I said with deadpan sarcasm.
Even when I married my Black-American husband in my 20s while visiting the US, I still wasn’t ‘black enough’. We went on to have our daughter, Phoebe, and I worked in Washington DC for ten years.
But to my husband’s family in North Carolina, I was a novelty act once again. Cars full of relatives would drive over just to take a look at me and hear me talk.
Sometimes they’d use my husband as an interpreter to decipher my clipped British consonants. ‘Lord, honey, you speak so pretty!’ exclaimed one captivated aunt.
Another thing that set me apart from most Black-Americans was that I kept my hair natural. By the Eighties, the afro had been and gone; now Americans, both black and white, looked askance at my natural kinky hair. It was passé, it was unfashionable, and in the embassy where I worked, a black colleague hinted, it looked ‘unprofessional’.
Again, I was guilty of not conforming to standard behaviours for black people.
Tina says she did not conform to standard behaviours for black people. After ten years in America she returned to the UK as a divorced single mother with her daughter, then aged five
In Black-American culture back then, unkinking your natural hair was seen as an essential step towards acceptability. Bowing to pressure, I spent five hours in a salon getting my hair chemically relaxed, but I never did get used to the sight of myself with straight hair and I couldn’t wait for it to grow out.
I’m not alone. I’ve heard plenty of similar stories from biracial people like me who have found their behaviours, tastes and lifestyles challenged as not being black enough to conform to some unwritten standard of authenticity. Celebrities and high-profile power brokers find themselves in the same cultural firing line.
When Barack Obama became US President in 2009, he had to convince the Black-American Establishment that he was ‘black enough’.
Brought up by his single white mother in Hawaii with an absent black father, what were his black credentials? Just how black was he exactly? ‘I had no idea who my own self was,’ states Obama of his early years in his autobiography.
For those of us who are betwixt and between, unravelling our identity and our place in the world can be a perplexing business. Black and white. Neither and both.
After ten years in America, I returned to the UK as a divorced single mother with my five-year-old daughter.
With an absent Black-American father and a biracial British mother, growing up in the UK has not been without its challenges for her, either.
Now 40, she wears her blackness with a sense of cultural ownership that says there’s more than one way of being black.
It seems to me we are all products of our environments and experiences, and learning to embrace all of it is surely how we show our true colours.
- Hair Apparent: A Voyage Around My Roots (£20, Biteback) by Tina Shingler is out now.
