"Vogue Magazine's" Fashion News Editor, Chioma Nnadi takes on the cross-intersectionality of being Black and British under a Trump Presidency.
It was the weekend after the presidential election, and what had to so many felt unthinkable had actually happened—bolstered by waves of misogynist and isolationist rhetoric, Donald Trump had actually won. After the initial rush of protest rallies, the atmosphere throughout New York City was somber. A friend had invited a small group of similarly downtrodden souls for dinner at his partner’s apartment on the Upper East Side, aiming to lift our spirits. “Creative solidarity is essential for the most urgent matter,” read the email. “Looking forward to seeing. Supper at 6:00 p.m.” The idea of commiserating over wine and home-cooked food seemed particularly soothing. It was an unseasonably warm Sunday evening, and so I made a pit stop at the Met Breuer on my way from Brooklyn before I continued walking uptown, buoyed by the mood-brightening effects of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings. Against the stark white walls of the museum, his colorful, noble scenes of black American life had an optimism that was thoroughly uplifting and felt universal, one that seemed to suggest to me that the future might not be so bleak after all.
That positive thinking came to an abrupt end some 20 blocks north, when I arrived at my friend’s building and was pointed in an unfamiliar direction, away from the wood-paneled elevator banks, toward a small door at the opposite end of the lobby. Moments later, I found myself in the bowels of the building, not my friend’s warm, comforting apartment. It took a few minutes for me to realize that instead of directing me to the dinner party on the ninth floor, the doorman had sent me to the service entrance. I looked down at my clothes under the flickering florescent lights—plaid Junya Watanabe jacket, fire-engine red leather boots, and turquoise statement earrings—kooky art dealer, maybe—but delivery person? And then, of course, it dawned on me: It was because of the color of my skin.
I am lucky. It had been a long time since I’d experienced discrimination on such a rudimentary level in New York, though, of course, this minor incident paled in comparison to the grim hate crimes and police shootings that have been making headlines lately. Ultimately, it was further confirmation of what I already knew: that the bubble on our so-called post-racial society had burst long ago. Trump wasn’t even the needle that popped it—he was the grim residue.
Granted, as a black British woman, I am in some ways already at a distance from the complicated racial politics of this country. Though I have a deep connection with and admiration for the African-American experience, I can’t claim to know all of its complexities firsthand. I recently heard comedian Gina Yashere, a black woman who was born and raised in the U.K., jokingly tell the BBC in an interview that her English accent had gotten her out of a lot of trouble in America; that resonated with me. I know that I can change the course of a first impression with my voice, disorientating those with preconceived notions of blackness. My Britishness can offer an escape route from the insidious little boxes that have formed over centuries to stifle African-Americans. I am “other” in a way that is nebulous to some, and so considered to be more exotic than threatening. Throw the fact that I’m also half white into the equation, and my identity becomes even more difficult to contain.
The complexities of being biracial were something I navigated relatively easily as a child. The central London community in which I grew up was like something out of a Zadie Smith novel; the neighbors in our government housing block were all first- or second-generation immigrants like us—Irish, Portuguese, Ghanaian, Jamaican, Indian; most of the kids at my public elementary school were Bengali, and so we celebrated Muslim holidays like Eid along with Christmas and Easter in class. My parents encouraged me and my brothers to see our mixed heritage as a blessing, and made sure we socialized with other black and brown kids; my two best friends in the neighborhood were both mixed—one of Dutch and Nigerian origins, the other with Greek Cypriot and Barbadian roots.
It was only when we stepped outside of that working-class, multicultural safe zone that things got weird, like the time my older brother was chased by skinheads on his way back from a soccer game in the East End. London in the late ’80s wasn’t always a friendly place, but then neither was Continental Europe. I remember traveling to see my Swiss grandparents with my mother and younger brother, and the stares we got there were like nothing I’d ever known. Few could believe that our mother was really our mother, assuming that we’d been rescued from an orphanage in some faraway land by this dark-haired white lady. And when we said we were from London, the next question was always the inevitable: “But where are you really from?” We were welcomed with open arms in Nigeria, my father’s homeland, though still as something of a space oddity, especially in rural parts of the country. I remember one woman at the local village market running up to me with a huge smile on her face, excited to tell me that I was the first white person she’d ever seen: in her mind, all Westerners were essentially one and the same, regardless of color.
It’s perhaps why I’ve sought out safe zones of a similar kind to those of my childhood as an adult. Moving to Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn—what had been pitched to me as “the Brixton of New York” 14 years ago—was somewhat of a survivalist move on my part. Sure, it helped that the rooms for rent were then within my modest price range as a young writer working at a downtown magazine, but beyond the practicalities, this was a place that felt like home. It was comforting to hear both church bells and the prayer song of the local mosque on my morning coffee run; my favorite Senegalese hair-braiding spot downtown was only a short bus ride away; and whether I was in the mood for jollof rice or jerk chicken, I could satisfy my craving within a matter of blocks.
While gentrification has displaced some of my favorite spots, the most imminent threat to diverse, vibrant neighborhoods like mine are the racism and bigotry that has drifted this way in the past year. When I once openly envied the Americans who’d been lucky enough to have Barack Obama for a president, the outcome of the last election had me instinctively reaching for my European passport and plotting an escape. That said, returning to the U.K., and Brexit, a referendum that has exposed all kinds of a xenophobic fault lines in British society, wasn’t exactly a welcoming thought; outside of London, the very idea of England as my motherland never had much meaning to me anyway.
Those initial feelings of panic and despair have dissipated for the most part in the three months since, and deepened into a new resolve. Now more than ever, I’m determined to stake my claim here, to deepen the roots I’ve already planted. Some might call me naive for clinging to the old New York clichés—the place where you can be whoever you want to be, where everything is possible, and all weirdos great and small are encouraged to let their freak flag fly—but shouldn’t we all have our own set of keys to this city?
It’s a thought that crossed my mind when I found myself at a friend’s holiday party uptown a few weeks ago, at the same Upper East Side address I’d visited back in November. This time around the doorman on duty rushed over to welcome me with cheery salutations as I hovered nervously in the lobby, barely giving me a chance to name-check the host before he ushered me toward the elevators I’d been denied before. It was somehow strangely empowering to know that I’d been given access to both the basement and the upper floors of the building, two totally different strata. Being temporarily locked out of one was jarring, but it hadn’t taken away from the sense of belonging I felt in New York as a whole. Nor should it deter the young dream-chasers of every color and creed who come here from all corners of the world. This city—this country—would be incomplete without them.