On Midweek this week Pauline Black spoke of her experience of being a mixed race child adopted by a white couple in 1950s Britain.
Hair problems got a particular mention.
When you stop to consider the question, the importance of the role played by hair colour & texture in our contemporary classifications of whether someone is white or black or some other non-white category is startling.
It must have been sometime in the 1990s that I became acutely aware of this. Fashionable young men (such as David Beckham) wore what I think was called a No2 cut – a very close shave.
Suddenly Manchester seemed full of young 20- or 30-somethings, suits with unstructured jackets, open necked shirt, hair which revealed nothing but its colour, no texture.
And I realised that I often could not determine, for example, whether he were (to put it in shorthand) African or Indian – not in any sense that really matters, just in the casual way that one, sometimes, thinks West Indian, African, Chinese, French, Scandinavian, American ...
Except of course that sometimes it really does matter, especially when other stereotypes & prejudices come into play, or even a conviction that we can be divided into distinct groups according to our race.
Sometime around then the BBC were trailing a programme about the human race (I forget what it was called) with a film of hundreds of people of all ages & races, naked. I even forget whether the point of this was to illustrate our infinite variety or our sameness. But it would be startling - & very instructive – to see the same film with all the participants given a No2 cut, just to emphasise how much we tend to base so many judgements on just this one characteristic.
