Reuben Hester
Musician

For me, it’s more of an awareness thing. Being mixed race myself – but not being full of colour in my skin, as you would normally expect of someone who is “mixed race” – has been challenging. My dad was half-Jamaican, and he looked Black. There was always this thing of, “That’s not your dad because he’s Black and you’re white.”
That’s highly inappropriate. It’s also a bit small-minded. People of all colours, shapes and sizes come from people of all colours, shapes and sizes.

Anybody in the town I grew up in, Wexford, who was of colour, they’d always get the same thing.

“Oh that must be Kevin’s son or Kevin’s daughter, because they’re also mixed race.” Just because there’s someone else in the town who is of colour, you associate it with “Oh that’s their son” or “Oh that’s their daughter.” I found that extremely ignorant and rude. My dad was one of the only people in town of colour at the time, and everyone knew it by calling him “Black Kev”. Not just Kevin, it was “Black Kev” because people are blissfully ignorant of the whole culture.

I brought someone over once from England who was mixed race, and they thought that was his daughter straight away! I was like, “She’s not my sister.” And they’re like, “Well, that’s not your dad.” And I’m like, “Well, I am his son. Obviously, I’ve got big curly hair.” That definitely hit me growing up – that there was such a lack of knowledge on the subject of being mixed race.

It’s  really upsetting to see that people are so ignorant in relation to race. I listen to reggae often. But when I’d sing reggae, people would look at me like, “You’re not Black.” I was like, “I don’t need to be Black visually to be into a certain song of a certain genre.”

Read Part 2 of 100 Voices: #AllAgainstRacism in the current issue of Hot Press:

Special thanks to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission for their support in this project.