Identity is complicated: Growing up in America as a Coloured South African
My experiences, and what I believe it means to shape your own identity and the impact that can have on yourself and others
Do you consider yourself South African or American?
I am not entirely sure what inspired me to write all of this down, but it started lying in bed at midnight, trying to answer that question. My friends and I had a long talk at dinner that night about our different family histories, about some great-grandparents arriving on boats from Italy, others from Ireland, and how my parents came to the United States with nothing but two suitcases and a two-year-old (me). Everyone was so excited to share their story, and I started to think about why I still identify as South African despite living in the United States for the majority of my life.
A few days later, I coincidentally listened to an interview with Lewis Hamilton where he spoke about how "we often live in fear of what other people think" and how he wanted to stimulate those discussions about race, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It made me want to start a conversation about identity.
So I am here to share my story in the hopes that it helps you come to your own conclusions about identity, and stirs discussions with your family and friends. I am fascinated by the complexities of identity and the different experiences that play a role in shaping our idea of self, and I believe that others are too.
This article is about four significant, though often conflated, aspects of our racial and ethnic identity: nationality, ethnicity, heritage, race. While they are related, my thesis is that each individual has authority over how much weight each of them carry in creating their own identity.
Let's speak the same language
It is important that you understand the definitions of the “identity terms” above for the context of this article:
Nationality: The sovereign state you are a legal citizen of.
Ethnicity: A social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language.
Heritage: The ancestors of a person, and what they identified with.
Race: A construct that humans created that categorizes the appearance of a human being, often by their skin tone.
To give a concrete example: I was born in South Africa, raised in the United States since age 2, and became an American citizen at age 24. So my nationality is now American, my ethnicity is more American than South African as I cannot speak Afrikaans (though I know what a lekker braai is like), but my heritage is South African and even has some German in it.
Which brings us to a complicated one: race.
The situations that really had me question my identity were selecting my race on standardized tests. There were three options that may have applied to me: African American, White, or Other. I do not consider myself White, and I was not yet American, so the term "African American" did not apply to me either (moreover, there are a lot of White people in Africa, and Black people in the Caribbean). Leaving us with the last option of "Other", yet there was always a feeling of being an outsider or pariah by having to choose "Other". So, I found myself cycling between the three options, depending how I felt on the given day. Though, it was more than just these demographic surveys that complicated my perception of my race.
So is your mom Black or is your dad Black?
My answer to the question above is always "neither". It’s an odd feeling when people don’t understand what ethnicity you are.
I am a Coloured South African, which can also be referred to as “mixed race”, but here, it is far deeper than what “mixed” is generally considered in the United States. While Apartheid had ended before I was born, it shaped South Africa's system of racial classification. There are generally 4 categories one would fall into: Black, White, Coloured, or Indian/Asian. Both of my parents are Coloured, but it's not that simple: one side of my mom's family was more fair – classified as White, while the other darker, though marginally – classified as Coloured.
In South Africa, race is so much deeper than “one parent being white and the other black” — so much so that my parents have said they were never even asked about their parents' races. Which at first seems odd, given how integrated Apartheid was. But at the same time, it shows that race is an arbitrary thing that varies depending on where in the world you are. Though, paradoxically, I heavily weight being Coloured in my identity.
Americans, in my experience, often have difficulty comprehending how being "South African Coloured" works, and that's ok. I do not expect anyone to understand foreign cultural concepts, just as I'm naive to many myself. Growing up, I found that it was the tone of these racially probing questions – which were really assumptions – that made me feel ostracized.
Over time, these kinds of experiences blurred the lines of race for me, and I found myself weighing my South African heritage and race more heavily than my nationality and ethnicity.
Why do I call myself South African?
South Africa will always be a home for me, despite how little time I have spent there. Home is not a physical place but a feeling. It is hard to put into words. Part of it is textbook, instinctual in-group psychology – are there people around you that look like you? I love this German word my friend shared with me: heimat, which roughly translates to a "home where you do not have to explain yourself".
In the "Melting Pot" of the United States, I do feel heimat with my family and friends, but it was in the aforementioned moments growing up where I questioned how I fit into this Melting Pot. It comes back to the fact that if the person I'm speaking with does not have context on South Africa, they will not understand what it means to be Coloured.
Reconciling the South African and American parts of my identity was something that I struggled with in the past; however, now, I embrace my uniqueness and find it to be a strength.
Being a Coloured South African is my identity, and we all have the power to decide how we shape our own identity – how much weight we put on each of those 4 inputs: race, nationality, ethnicity, heritage. And that weight could be zero if your identity is shaped around something else. There is no right or wrong. The important part is that we are in control.
After reading this, I hope that you:
1/ Start the conversation with your own family and friends about their identity and how it plays a role in their lives.
2/ Do not make assumptions about others' identity. Just ask. It will likely prompt emotional discussions from that person, and you will likely leave a deeper understanding of how they view themselves. Personally, I'd like someone to just show genuine curiosity, and inquire “May I ask what your ethnicity is?”. All I ask is that we please do not inquire about someone's heritage or ethnicity or race by asking “What are you?” – well, I am a human being, a software engineer, a male. No part of that answer I just gave has anything to do with where I am from or my racial or ethnic identity.
3/ Find a community where you feel at home. Build one if it does not exist. For example, Amazon's Affinity Groups provide a supporting community for diversity and inclusion. I am currently the vice president of Amazon's Black Employee Network Tech (BEN Tech) Affinity Group, which started with six engineers looking to form a tech-focused BEN chapter, and it has since grown to hundreds of members. As of writing this, we have helped almost 100 under-represented software engineers and managers get hired at Amazon Web Services.
I share this anecdote to show that we can all make a difference, and the best place to start is dialogue and attempting to understand each other. I’m proud to call myself a Coloured South African, and I would love to tell you about what it means to me.
If you have any thoughts, insights, or questions for me, please feel free to reach out at splashofcolour@substack.com.