Alfred Enoch writes a letter to his younger self
Alfred wrote this letter for Metro.co.uk as part of Black History Month.
‘Dear Alfie, Last week I was thinking a fair bit about Kwame Ture. You don’t know who he is. And if I were to use the name Stokely Carmichael that wouldn’t help you either. Nor do you know Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin. I don’t say this to judge you. I only found out who Kwame Ture was the week before last and I’m no expert on the other names I’ve mentioned.
Mine is a glass house so I’m wary of throwing stones. In time you’ll get warier too. It’s a good thing. You’ll also become more aware. Really the difference between us is not a spattering of knowledge about black America in the 20th Century, it’s that I’m in the early stages of a journey that you are yet to conceive of. It will begin in 2014. You’re going to get a job in America. It will change your career. It will change you. More specifically, it will change the way you see yourself. For what I think will be the first time in your life, you will not just be aware, but conscious of your ethnicity. You will become conscious of how that affects the way you are perceived, the way you are treated, and of a wider narrative of which you are a part.
Your lack of consciousness – and, to reiterate, that’s not a judgement and it doesn’t come from a place of ‘enlightenment’- is a result of your very specific circumstances. Having a black Brazilian mother and a white English father has given you two very distinct models for your two nationalities. Inevitably your perspective of what it is to be English has been largely framed by your white, public school and Oxford-educated actor father, who you first saw on stage performing Shakespeare’s Henry V. (Albeit as the king of France).
With this in mind and the fact that you enjoyed the same extensive educational privileges, it is no surprise that you do not question your place in a society where not all black people feel as comfortable as you do. While some grew up missing the presence of people who looked like them on television, you were watching your own father.
A friend once mentioned to me “that thing all black mothers tell their children: that you have to be twice as good to get half as much.” Your mum has never told you this. She has high expectations of you, but she has never framed these in any kind of racial context. She has never disturbed your sense of belonging with warnings about those who might see you differently. Perhaps this was a risk, but it was also an extraordinary feat of parenting.
She grew up under a military dictatorship in a Brazil that was even more unequal than the one you know today. She was one of the few black students at her university, the only one in her year at the medical school. She funded her degree by working as a teacher at a school far outside of Rio while studying at the same time.
In the 70s she came to England as a foreigner to do her masters, in the 80s she moved for good. She has experienced racism that neither you nor I could fathom. This was an extraordinary feat of parenting.
What our mother has given us is the freedom to capitalise on our unusual set of circumstances and form an identity outside of the perception of blackness as otherness.
But in America, it is precisely your identity as an outsider – as a foreigner and a person of colour – that will give you a new perspective on your ethnicity. You will begin to ask, for the first time, what it is to be black in a predominantly white society. You will be challenged by people dear to you, emboldened by people more desperate than you, and welcomed by people unknown to you. You will begin to see the wood as well as the trees.
I now see the uniqueness in my own experience. And although I’m grateful for the fact that it’s served to protect my sense of belonging and identity from those who have sought to marginalise me, I acknowledge too that this has come at a price. As is so often the way, my own privileges blinded me to the difficulties of others. My understanding of the workings of society was from the blinkered perspective of one who had not felt its iniquities.
It was America that helped me first to begin to see racial injustice, and then to see my own blindness. All I ask of you is that you open your eyes.’
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