Privilege based on skin colour isn’t ‘white’, it’s ‘light’. — You probably think that ‘white privilege’ doesn’t belong to me. How could it when my skin is brown? But I have a secret I haven’t shared, something that until now I have dared not say out loud for fear of being shouted down. I don’t think it should be called…

How we as writers can change the world, one imagination at a time — As a mixed-race woman raising mixed children, representation in literature is something I am keenly aware of. We are doing better now than the white-washed characters of my youth, but my children’s faces are still missing from the majority of the books they love. Myths, legends, and fairy-tales are still…

The daily microaggression you can change today — It used to be thought in ancient cultures that if you held someone’s true name, you held power over them. In modern times we lead with our names, they travel out before us, introducing us to the world and holding images in the receiver’s mind. They hold no power over…

Our assumptions about others must be more than skin deep — I’m mixed-race living in a predominantly white area and I assumed I knew privilege intimately. I was wrong. Whenever white privilege has been discussed over the last few years it is predominantly in reference to either race or gender, but it impacts so much more. I remember the first moment…

Can white writers create characters of color? — In response to my article ‘What Does Positive Representation in Fiction Really Look Like?’, a reader posed the question, is it okay for white writers to have a main character of another race? As questions of representation and appropriation rise and fall in our cultural dialogue, it is of no…

When you are neither black nor white, you inhabit a new space in between with its own experience. — Growing up as a mixed-race child in 80s London, the narrative that black was bad seeped into the pores of my brown skin. The racism I experienced was rarely overt, that is not the British way, but it was a regular and insistent knocking against my young identity. The unpleasant…