Black Voices: Finding confidence in my own Black skin

“I’m often met with shock or even disgust when people meet me for the first time. I can often spot the look of recoil that I’ve come to expect throughout my life and yet, still, every time I feel disappointed.

“It’s particularly worse when I have talked to someone on the phone before I meet them. I don’t sound ‘ethnic’ in any way, be it by name or by the way I talk. Then, when I’m met in person, I often get the comment, ‘oh, you don’t look how you sound’, or better still, ‘I didn’t expect you to be Black!’”

Marie Williams received that comment in a corporate meeting from a white woman and decided to challenge her. “She started digging a hole. ‘From how you sound on the phone I thought you’d be a schoolteacher,’ she said. ‘So, a schoolteacher can’t be Black either?’ I responded. Lucky for her the meeting started, and I felt it wasn’t appropriate to carry on.”

Marie laughs as she recalls that moment, but at the time she felt upset and hurt. “It always upsets me. You don’t get used to it. You hope and expect it will get better.” She is perhaps able to laugh about it because she’s been the victim of far more vile and disgusting racial abuse throughout her life.

Marie and her younger sister grew up in a very white affluent neighborhood in Hampshire in the south of England. Their mother was African descent from Seychelles and her father was English and white.

Most neighbors would not allow their children to play with Marie and her sister. “We got racial abuse from most of our neighbors all the time,” remembers Marie. “It was stuff like, ‘we don’t want Blacks here’, or ‘you should go back to where you came from’, or ‘you’re mongrel children’.

“It was normal. That was our life. If you’ve always had it then you don’t know it’s wrong.”

Life got tougher around the age of eight when Marie started to get bullied and racially abused at her predominately white school. But looking back, it’s the attitude of the teachers that angers Marie the most.

“I wanted to learn the violin, but the music teacher refused saying ‘my fingers were the wrong shape’. Of course, they weren’t. Another teacher decided I wasn’t worth teaching altogether, believing I didn’t have the capacity to learn and so I was stuck at the back of the class. It was obvious she was racist.

“At parents’ evening she said, ‘well look at her, she couldn’t possibly learn’. My dad flipped, and that was my last day at that school.”

From the age of 10, Marie went on to flourish in a private school run by nuns that wouldn’t tolerate racism. But leaving the confines of school, racism soon resurfaced when she joined the police.

The police years

“I was told that I was a traitor to my race. People were disgusted with me and told me I was ‘dead’ to them. ‘You will never be one of them’, I often heard. And that was from my mother, my family and my Black community.”

Marie quickly learned that racism existed within the police when she started her 8-week basic training. “I was ostracized. I didn’t have any allies or friends. I had to watch my back constantly. It was hard. People would sabotage my kit or try and mess up my assessments.”

When she joined her first station, the challenges continued. “My white shift sergeant was horrendous; she was awful and would treat me badly. She often put me in risky situations and did not give me the same support that everyone else got.

“On one occasion, we had to arrest someone from a violent family who were well-known extreme right-wing activists. So of course, I was sent to go on my own. Thankfully one of my colleagues Jim decided by himself to back me up. We arrested him and threw him in the van and, oh my God, the racial abuse was horrific. Probably the worst racial abuse I've ever had in my life.

“It was vile, vulgar screaming that people on the street could hear. He was so violent and aggressive. He hated me that much he purposefully tried to crash the van by forcefully throwing himself around inside it, hoping that the van would roll over. It was terrifying!

“I was expecting racial abuse, but Jim was traumatized by it all and wanted to charge him with a racially aggravated offense, or even assault on police. But we were told, ‘you’re police officers, you should expect abuse’.”

Marie moved to a new shift, under a different sergeant, and her working life improved. Following two years’ probation, she joined a child protection division and worked alongside health, social care and voluntary organizations that were more diverse. But racial abuse from the public – name calling, spitting, and vile and aggressive behavior – continued throughout her police career.

“It impacted me emotionally and mentally. I got numb to it. It was normalized. It was expected and it was just life.”

After 10 years, Marie left the police and joined Social Services in Wembley, London – a local government-led organization that protects the wellbeing of children and vulnerable adults.

“For once I felt like I fitted in. There were a lot of Black people; it was a multi-cultural organization and very diverse. I felt included and that I belonged there. I was also able to process the racial trauma that I had experienced, rather than continue to live through it.”

Having grown up and worked in predominately white, and often racist, communities, the new job was a turning point in Marie’s life that enabled her to realize that “Black is a beautiful thing; it’s something to be embraced. I became more connected to my heritage because I wasn’t afraid to do so. I was more confident in my own Black skin. This is who I am. I was finally able to own my truth.”

Marie’s newfound self-confidence enabled her to enter the corporate world and face down any ‘I didn’t expect you to be Black’ comments. Although she says subtle racism can be more difficult to tackle than blatant racial abuse.

History repeats

But Marie’s story doesn’t end there. The saddest part is yet to come. In fact, history repeated itself with her daughter.

Marie married a white man and she describes their daughter’s looks as Mediterranean with olive skin, green eyes and dark blonde hair.

“She’s not obviously mixed-race, so if we go to the shops people look at us and think ‘what’s happening there?’ They look at my husband and daughter and they’re fine. Then they get to me and take a double look. Am I the step mum? Am I the nanny?! I’ve had those comments a few times.”

Marie soon realized her daughter’s school, like her own school, fostered a racist environment. “Parents and teachers were surprised to discover I was Black. We noticed Black kids came and went very quickly. There were instances where kids wouldn’t hold hands with other Black or Indian children because they considered them dirty. And my daughter is watching all this behavior!

“She’s thinking, ‘I’m getting away with this, but if my mum turns up, I’m going to get it’,” says Marie. “And so, my daughter became embarrassed of me, even ashamed of me. She didn’t want me coming to the school. It was self-preservation from her perspective. But for me, it was soul destroying.”

By this time in our interview, Marie and I have been speaking for 90 minutes. Despite sharing stories of the racial abuse she’s suffered all her life; Marie is now visibly upset revisiting these recent memories.

“I felt awful. It was genuinely the worst thing that’s happened in my entire life and it went on for a couple of years,” says Marie, close to tears.

As with her own childhood, Marie moved her daughter to a new school that was more diverse and tolerant. But she also noticed a significant change in her daughter following the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

“She was 12 and old enough to understand what’s happening in the world. And now she’s embracing her heritage. She now proudly says, ‘I'm mixed-race, my mum’s Black’. She has joined the school council and continually questions, ‘what are we doing about diversity and culture in the school?’”

Like mother, like daughter, both now realize that Black is a beautiful thing. They have embraced their heritage. Let’s hope Marie’s daughter – and all young people of color – never faces the same racism endured by her mother.