Where Harlesden had been black, Oxford was white. I went from being the only white kid on the team to the only black kid on the team.
Are you black, brother? Growing up, I just was. My mum was white and my dad was brown. My mum’s relatives lived here, and the old ones had German accents. My dad’s relatives lived in Israel and mostly couldn’t speak English. When we went there, they said things in a funny language and pinched our cheeks. They smelled of garlic. And they came, originally, from exotic-sounding places like Bukhara and Isfahan (in today’s Uzbekistan and Iran respectively).
This was no big deal. My friends’ families came from Jamaica and Guyana and India and Ireland and England and Wales and Spain and South Africa. I was vaguely aware that I was Jewish; but everyone was something. None of it seemed very serious. Things started to change when I went to secondary school. My state primary had been mixed, multicultural, and multi-ability. My new school was private, posh, and predominantly Jewish. But these Jews weren’t like my family. They were all white, and a lot of them were blond with blue eyes. Not only that, but they liked football, talked like cockneys, and lived in the suburbs. They went to synagogue – ‘shul’ – and hung around only with other Jews. Some of them called black people ‘schwarzes’ and brown people ‘pakis’ and they didn’t know what to make of me, this olive-skinned Jew who didn’t practise. One of them told me that because of my irreligiosity the Messiah would not be coming.
At about 14, I started playing basketball seriously. The Harlesden Cougars basketball club was 99% black. The other 1% was me. I wasn’t black, and couldn’t understand the patois into which the other guys sometimes lapsed. I was basically the white kid, or the whitest they had. And then came university. Where Harlesden had been black, Oxford was white. I went from being the only white kid on the team to the only black kid on the team. The blackest they had, anyway. They even told me that I had natural athleticism but lacked control and shouldn’t shoot the ball.
Away from the basketball court I had a few amusing incidents. One night, a very drunk, very blonde girl staggered into my room. ‘I’ve never really met a coloured person before,’ she confided in me. When I told her that we didn’t say coloured, we said black, and in any case I was not black but Jewish, her reply was: ‘I’ve never met one of those either’. All this time, I scrawled sarcastic comments across any ethnic monitoring forms that came my way. Well, it’s not nice when they don’t have a box for you.
That became considerably harder after university, when I got a job running diversity policy for a big company. I learned about institutional racism and about monitoring and about glass ceilings and about how, at every imaginable stage in recruitment, promotion and termination, across all employment sectors, people with darker skin get treated worse than people with lighter skin with the same aptitudes and qualifications. And I understood that without hard data, you couldn’t prove this was happening, and do anything about it. And that I ought to fill the form in. So I started to tick the box ‘mixed race’.
As part of the job, I started to try and get more people from different ethnic backgrounds to apply to the company. I went out and started talking to groups of black people or Muslims or whatever. And they all thought I was one of them. The black people thought I was black – light-skinned, certainly, but black. Muslims assumed I was Muslim. Indians had me down as an Indian. Arabs thought I was an Arab. Greeks – well, check the surname: Mokades.
>> Raphael Mokades <<
