Mistaken Identities
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Mistaken Identities
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Perspectives
Words By: Eni Subair
Illustrations: Emily Pearman
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As I was ending another day of events prep a few months ago, for a new restaurant cashing in on the millennial thirst for all things vegan, I was approaching the cloakroom, only to be disrupted on my journey by a white woman at the till who had asked me to ‘fetch her a coffee’. My first inclination was that she couldn't have been speaking to me as I did not work at the restaurant, I had no apron on so was visibly not employed at this establishment. In fact we had had a prior conversation about my exact role. Then it dawned on me - she had thought I was the same young black female cashier that had been serving her minutes before.
As a black woman it’s needless to say this was not the first time a white woman had mistaken me for another black woman because we “apparently looked the same” - that excuse was handed to me when I had previously encountered the same situation in 2016 when working in a retail store in an affluent area of London. A fellow female back colleague and myself had been mistaken for being the same person. I had box braids and she had an afro, and our features could not have looked any more different. Aside from our complexion, we looked nothing alike, however when the flustered customer realised her error the we were made to seem as though we were the ignorant, incapable ones unable to serve her correctly. The even bigger blow was that one of the white female managers dismissed my very much justified upset & anger and brushed it off as the customer simply being “misunderstood”. I then wondered at which point am I, an employee, allowed to feel protected by the very same people that were supposed to protect me in the workplace? When could I vent my frustrations about this situation without feeling as though my ‘black’ feelings were irrelevant?.
I was scrolling through Instagram recently and came across a meme which said “White people can identify 200 breeds of dogs but will mix up two black co-workers”. Upon reading this my immediate reaction was to laugh, engage in the light-hearted humour and jest. But as I realised that not only was this so incredibly honest & eye-opening, it was what me and many other POC I know in real life and online. I sent the meme to some of my closest friends who had spoken to me about dealing with the same situation one way or another, and the way almost all of us had dealt with the situation was to quietly stew in our upset, perhaps because we were too shocked to respond or too tired of fighting.
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"For your peace of mind and mental health it can be a raging battle to determine how to deal with daily occurrences of the unjust vilification black people face."
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As a relatively shy character, what I’ve come to realise is that confrontation is not just uncomfortable, it’s not easy to confront strangers or those you deem close to you. For your peace of mind and mental health it can be a raging battle to determine how to deal with daily occurrences of the unjust vilification black people face. Particularly when employment and the workplace comes into the equation, the balance can be distorted and make it easy for me to shy away when coping with an issue that can affect my income or my reputation but sitting out isn’t an option either. When dealing with the previously mentioned situations, my response was to internalise my upset and compartmentalise it. The question posed is how much damage does this do in the long term?. But how can I also preserve my mental health when picking and choosing my battles?. I’m still very much learning to balance the two, the stigma of coming across as the ‘angry black woman’ is still very much alive and kicking.
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Unpacking the fact that the long stemmed history of the white privilege that both women in my situation benefit from on a daily basis, means that their “error” in their ignorant, racist act was a fleeting afterthought, and forgotten once they stepped outside, is a disturbing reality. My upset and anger is evident. I’m exhausted, yet unsurprised. I’m not expecting the systemic walls of oppression built to suppress POC to be obliterated overnight, at least not in a world where Trump is president, but It’s embarrassing that in 2018 POC have to announce, “no, no we all don’t look alike”. Is it too much to expect people to catch up?
Apparently so.
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Words By: Eni Subair, 18th July 2018
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CONTEMPORARY CONVERSATIONS
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