‘Comfortable in a House I Own or in My Own Skin?’ The Black Girl Countryside Paradox
By Shannen Grant
There are certain milestones in life, like starting school, graduating from university, moving out of your parent’s home… I am approaching my next milestone: buying a property. Normal questions circle around my head. Can I really afford this? How are the schools in the area? Is there enough room if I want a family? But I find myself stuck on one important question: will there be enough black people where I go?
Excluding university, I have lived in London my whole life. I had no desire to move anywhere else and felt that London had everything I could and would ever want. But as I settle into the full sway of my twenties, I find that my desires have shifted somewhat. I would quite like a garden. I’m appreciating long walks more. I don’t want to live in a basement.
When I do a house viewing, it’s really more of an area viewing. Most recently, after seeing one particular house, my partner and I decided to cycle around the town (a quaint town in Kent). The town had everything I wanted in abundance: space, green areas, plant shops, brunch spots and, best of all, a train that can get you to London in 35 minutes. There was only one thing that was conspicuously lacking – diversity.
When you walk into certain areas of London you feel as though you’ve come to a safe haven. A pocket that’s made with you in mind; a respite from the burden of navigating microaggressions. These places can be as unassuming as a hair shop that sells things you’d never find in Boots or an eating place that does the nicest fried plantain. Alongside these places are more motivated spaces that explore black Britishness with more intention: a book-reading centred around black female childhood, a play about black masculinity. These spaces are important and while mulling over my attachment to London, I found myself motivated to learn how this safe haven came to be.
Black Britishness is not new. And I’m not talking about the Britishness manufactured within the colonies prior to the fall of Empire. I mean even on the Island, Black Britishness was present. In the 1760s, between 10,000-15,000 of the nation's 20,000 black people lived in London, including the writers Oluadah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, literate black men who relayed their experiences of slavery and rallied support for the abolition movement.
Within the same century came the arrival of more than 1000 Black Loyalists: black American soldiers who fought on the side of the British during the War of Independence in exchange for their freedom. Centuries later was the Windrush, where black people were housed in communities like Brixton, an area that boasts this history unapologetically. Presently, the numbers stay consistent. According to the Office of National Statistics, in 2018 there were 2,133,000 black people in the UK, 1,052,000 of whom lived in London.
Recognising this Black Britishness within London is not to undermine other areas of the country that have long-standing histories of Blackness (Liverpool and Cardiff to name a few). It is intended to provide a glimpse of the culture that has thrived in London, creating a solidarity that is hard-wrought and painfully earned but from which blossomed a safe haven that is difficult to leave once it has been experienced.
I contemplate whether it was this solidarity that led my grandfather, a farmer from Jamaica, accustomed to growing yam, banana, plantain and ginger in abundance, to content himself with growing a few green bean plants in an altogether concrete paved garden in the middle of Camberwell. But a lot has changed since my grandad bought his property. I’m in my twenties, I can bring the culture I experienced during my formative years wherever I go. But what about someone who will not have the experience of a diverse landscape in their formative years?
Just like that, I, and I suspect a lot of other black people considering where to settle their roots, feel a creeping discomfort. During my viewing of said quaint Kent town, there was a community event. On a sunny day, families had come out to a park. Here, I noticed the lack (perhaps even absence?) of heterogeneity. While I inwardly joked that perhaps all the black people were late, I was also forced to consider the possible implications of this.
Dani McClain puts the issue very aptly in her own article ‘What’s Lost When Black Children Are Socialised into a White World’, where she challenges her reader to consider: ‘the verb socialise means to “make suitable for society”[…] but what does it mean to encourage a child to become suitable for a society that isn’t really suitable for her?’
She goes on to relay different tactics black parents execute to reconcile having their child in spaces that are at once beneficial and problematic. In the case of sending a child to a predominantly white school, McClain communicates instances of black parents attempting to combat this precarious issue: listening to the teacher’s ‘dismissive behaviour’ mentioned by the child and unpicking the implications as a family in the home; or pre-preparing a response to a classmate touching their hair.
A particular concern of mine is when this socialisation works in conjunction with the absence of the safe havens I mentioned before. I worry that a child would feel pressure to assimilate in a vain attempt to eliminate their otherness, an attempt that would only result in their own profound inability to be comfortable within their own skin. Even without the issue of homogeneity in London, I remember my mother playing ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ repeatedly during our rides to school and insisting I write my essay on Mary Seacole instead of the assigned task, a report on Florence Nightingale.
I knew the answer to my question before I asked it: I can worry about whether my own counteracting influence will be enough to balance a child, but I know it must be. The work will fall on myself and my partner to compensate for not only righting our child’s understanding of their own black Britishness in a curriculum and society that continually offers only a warped representation, but also for doubling that effort in light of our surroundings that starkly under-represent people of colour.
Perhaps my true question is whether a black person will ever be able to move within this country without needing to consider my prior questions. Whether they could ever settle and not need to consider whether it is at the detriment to their own sense of self. It seems to me that a black woman who chooses to live in the countryside may have to choose between two things: being at home in her house or being at home in her skin.