Abstract
As the daughter of a Black South African father who worked with ex-offenders and a white British mother who worked as a BBC television producer, my upbringing presented me with dilemmas around which world I ‘properly’ inhabited. This autoethnographic story traces how I experienced education as a struggle to reconcile my parents’ unspoken aspirations for me to be ‘middle class’, with the contradictory messaging I received from my peers, teachers and society about being a person of colour. It encapsulates the loneliness I felt in navigating this and my struggle for the ultimate ticket to what I thought would be acceptance and belonging; becoming a ‘clever girl’.
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Notes
- 1.
Like many of the terms I use to identify people in this piece, the reality is more complex than the term suggests. When my parents met, my father was working in the Anthropology department of Wits University as a research assistant and translator (taking post graduate students into the Black areas). He was one of the very few Black people who worked in the university and along with his former wife (a primary school teacher), was considered part of the emerging Black middle class there. At the time in South Africa, because of racial segregation, people didn’t think in class terms and Black people were just ‘Blacks’. Like many of his generation who experienced the Soweto uprising, he was a supporter of Black Consciousness who mainly saw himself in relation to the freedom struggle, identifying as an ‘activist’. He came to the UK as an undergraduate student, completed a degree in Anthropology and went on to work in a housing project for ex-offenders. When I asked him about class for the purpose of this piece, he explained that over the years he has come to both see himself and identify as ‘working class’ in UK class terms.
- 2.
My mother has since explained it was about preparing me for an entrance exam for a local private school she had her eyes on.
- 3.
Through conversations I have since had with my parents in preparation for this chapter, I now understand that my father’s withdrawal from my life also had a lot to do with the breakdown of his relationship with my mother. At the time, however, I did not know this.
- 4.
At times over the years, my mother’s frustration at my father’s unwillingness to partner her in the way she wanted or to father me the way she saw fit, would find momentary expression, in her referring to his ‘stupidity’. This became seared into my memory, implanting a fear that this may one day be true about me, his child.
- 5.
The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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I have involved both of my parents in the researching of this contribution and would like to thank them for their honesty, bravery and openness to this process.
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Rooper, M. (2019). ‘Untitled’. In: Goode, J. (eds) Clever Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_15
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