I have both white and black cousins, but best of all I have two places that I can call home.
How do you categorise someone who is not 100% white nor 100% black, without offending that person?
This is the debate that I walked into the other day, when a woman pointed at me and told her son: ‘That is a half caste.’
Why she did that I will never know, but it left me feeling hurt that the phrase is still being used.
Why so hurt? The answer is in the meaning of the words. If you research the definition of half caste, it says ‘a person of mixed racial descent.’
Fair enough, but read the synonyms and it tells you: amalgam, bastard, combination, composite, compound, cross, crossbreed, half-blood, half-breed, mongrel … to name just a few.
Caste was first used in India in the sixteenth century to describe the Hindu system of hierarchy. The term half-caste indicates how pure you are racially and echoes the days of colonial slavery when words such as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were commonplace in sales ledgers and even in post-emancipation days in the old United States census.
John Agard, from Guyana makes some brilliant points in his poem ‘Half caste‘:
>> Donah Sibanda <<
