As a black British woman, finding a partner of another ethnicity was not an option. It was a result of social barriers. “In my generation, we were invisible in British society.” Ade says. London is a difference place now, but integration is still only superficial and it is especially reflected in the friendships or lack thereof in school age children. “I remember being shocked at the levels of refusal [from parents] to encourage the kinds of contact that the schools facilitated on a domestic front,” Ade tells me. Her son is now seventeen years old.
“It’s easier to have a mixed race relationship in London than most other places, but it’s not all as peaches-and-cream as people like to paint it,” says Deborah Murray, a native Londoner of Jamaican descent.
Deborah is a language teacher and she lived in Russia for seven years teaching English. Having returned four years ago to London, she says much of the mixed dating you see is not a true representation of sexual and cultural politics in the capital.
“What people see around in Covent Garden and even as far as Oxford Street, that’s what people are basing London on… If you’re an ordinary person and you just want to hang out with people and you don’t care about what color they are, then you have to have very thick skin, but it depends on your nationality as well,” Deborah says.
“Whether you are a native or an immigrant in London, you face ethnic and cultural gender politics,” she tells me. “I think the whole sex thing is a major problem with people in general. What’s going on in Britain at the moment [is that] there’s so much mixing going on that it’s frightening people and they find other ways of trying to stop it happening, but it will continue because people are getting to know each other. The differences there aren’t bad ones, and you can learn from them,” she says.
Learning to love differences is exactly what my Dutch friend Carry VanLieshout did when she fell for her Italian boyfriend. “I said once [that] I would never date anyone shorter than me. I’m almost six feet tall. And I broke that one almost immediately afterward. Luca is shorter than me, and that made me realize you should never say something like [never] because it’s just stupid. You should never exclude something.”
