Personally speaking, being re-branded from half-caste to mixed race came as welcome relief. Yet, try as we might to change our image, we tragic ‘mulatresses’ remain as doggedly woeful as the salivating madwoman in Mr Rochester’s attic. Confused, miserable and in perpetual limbo, we are now apparently abundant in the world of celebrity.There is the soul singer Alicia Keys (raised in Hell’s Kitchen, absent black father); the actress Halle Berry (abusive, absent black father); the Olympic medalist Kelly Holmes (runaway daddy tracked down in Jamaica); and the pop star Mariah Carey (absentee black father, racially ambiguous look).
Now another has joined our ranks. The actress Sophie Okonedo, who received a best supporting actress nomination for Hotel Rwanda, has every prerequisite for official tragic status. As the London Evening Standard said, she fought ‘against the odds’: an absentee Nigerian father, a struggling Jewish mother, a project housing upbringing. Despite her insistence that she is at ease with her heritage, she’s being fast-tracked as Britain’s Halle Berry. It is dangerous territory. Berry is rarely mentioned without reference to her “against the odds” life story, which includes spending her childhood not black enough for black folks and too touched with the tar brush for those picky whites. Are you seeing a pattern here?
No sooner had double gold medallist Kelly Holmes crossed the finishing line at Athens last year than the media had her lined up as a subtle, triumph-over-miscegenation story. OK, not so subtle if you consider that Holmes’s post-Athens cuttings reveal that she’s the mixed-race child of a shiftless Jamaican father raised on a project housing estate in south-east England.
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