“You know Nadia, you’re the whitest Coloured at this party.”

I was in the bathroom helping my drunk friend, who is also Coloured, because she couldn’t stand on her own when she said this to me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I felt like a fraud, an imposter. What could I do to be more Coloured? What could I do to finally be accepted by them?

South Africa is called the Rainbow Nation for a reason. It is rich in so many categories- culture, ethnicity, race, religion -that we all end up mixing and matching to create something new. It’s almost like when you’re thrifting and you pick clothes from different places to make an outfit you’ve never worn before. The problem with thrifting though is that not every piece of clothing will fit you perfectly.

For my whole life, I’ve felt the same way about my identity.

My mother is a Coloured who grew up Christian and my dad is a mix of Indian and Coloured who grew up Muslim. I loved having a taste of Christmas and Eid, and Easter and Ramadan. But it came with problems too. I attended a Muslim school for ten years, predominantly made up of Indians, and never felt like I belonged. It didn’t come out of nowhere.

I distinctly remember an incident in second grade where my curly hair stuck out of my scarf and a classmate told the teacher I didn’t brush it. The teacher proceeded to ask me, in front of the entire class, why I didn’t brush my hair. From that day onwards, until about year eleven, I made sure to flat iron my hair. Just so that I could look more like them.

I fell short on a lot of other “traditional” Muslim-Indian aspects. Everybody had cousins upon cousins to hang out with, would talk about Bollywood movies and songs and attended several Mendhi nights for weddings I would never go to. 

So, it was very clear that I didn’t belong in school. But at least I had friends outside of school where I could belong, right?

Except, no.

Because there too I lacked a lot of Coloured aspects- not being able to dance as a friend told me, listening to music perceived as white, my accent and vocabulary that made me a coconut who, ‘thinks she’s better than everybody’… the list goes on. All these small details added up and made me shrink further and further into myself until I didn’t know who I was.

Then came the question that I asked myself over and over again: what will it take for me to be Coloured enough? Indian enough? Better yet, what will it take for me to be brown enough? I still don’t have an answer.

I’ve thankfully become more sure of myself as a 24-year-old and don’t let people dictate who I am, but when you’re young and vulnerable, it’s so difficult to find your place when an abundance of people are telling you what you’re doing wrong.

This is made even worse if you’re a person of colour.

Sure, it starts lighthearted enough when your friends are teasing you about being white because you can’t handle some spice. But it escalates. Suddenly you’re changing the way you speak, hiding your hobbies and becoming a completely different person all for the sake of trying to fit into the box of what people say your race should be.

If you’ve consumed any Western media, you’ll be aware of the ‘Angry Black Woman’ stereotype, which has led Black women to bite their tongues when they’re being mistreated because they don’t want to be seen as aggressive like all the movies and television shows portray them as. This is only one case of how people of colour are expected to fit into an impossible mould. I am not Black but I am Coloured and that has come with its own stereotypes. Around my Coloured friends, I’d do my best to be loud and rowdy because it made me fit in with that crowd, but around my Indian friends at school, I refrained from that because I didn’t want to be seen as ‘ghetto’ or dangerous. I only played certain songs around my Indian friends so they’d see me as one of them and completely ignored those same songs around my Coloured friends.

And for what?

For both sides to reject me and say I wasn’t Indian enough or Coloured enough. All my efforts were wasted and stomped on.

So came the day I decided that only I’d be the one who gets to have a say in who I am.

I presently identify as Coloured and while it seems like such an easy thing to say now, it wasn’t always like that. My dad told me that it was the same for him growing up. Neither side of his family wanted to claim him as Indian or Coloured. This isn’t by any means a new problem or something I exclusively deal with. I see it in many friends and family who have all grown sick of having their race policed and stereotyped.

Our only solution is to filter out the noise and focus on ourselves to protect our peace.

I’ve learned that no matter how hard I try to fit in, I won’t ever be able to control other people’s perceptions of me. I might as well listen to Taylor Swift because it makes me happy instead of worrying how it’ll make me less Coloured and brown to other people. There is no singular way to be Coloured, Black, Indian or any other race. It will be different for everybody because everybody experiences the world, and their culture, very differently.

Humans aren’t dolls made in a factory with one default setting. Colours of the rainbow can blend wonderfully to make new colours that are equally as bright. Self-acceptance and belonging aren’t something that comes easily however time does help. But if you’re somebody reading this who is lucky enough to have never felt ostracised or isolated by their race group/s, maybe think twice about clowning your friend about their identity. We’ve already had enough people doing it for us.