What is it about?
Gather in my Name, my Skin, my Everything…(‘Gather in my Name’: Maya Angelou, 1974) begins with a conversation between a Black woman and her white Mum. This paper may interest you if you are reading in the area of mixed race identity and relationships in families you live in personally or have worked/are working with. It discusses some honest reflections from one perspective, about the experiences of living in the U.K. in a mixed race family. I hope this will touch others who are interested personally and may also aid professionals, who need a starting point to begin to understand and explore the complexity of the identities involved in the lived experience of being mixed race and parenting.
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Why is it important?
This paper is intended to resonate with those who are in mixed race families, to acknowledge that their experiences can be complex and challenging and but are often taken for granted by those involved and those who are not. It is hoped that this raises awareness to the general public and to professionals working with children and families and adults, that this is an area that may need to be discussed and acknowledged and to be included or considered within assessments. Whether it be in an educational setting, such as a primary school, in health and social care education, or in training for the criminal justice system.To have some understanding of what coping mechanisms are involved in just day-to day living, I hope will assist in forging positive working relationships, sound assessments and and general awareness from a different perspective and that to make the time to dig deep into peoples lived experience or help people to self-reflect, can be very beneficial.
Perspectives
I am immensely proud of this paper, it was an emotional journey with my Mum and so I feel very privileged to have jointly written and presented 'the conversation' within this paper with my Mum. A first for both of us, we were very nervous and quietly thinking, 'who wants to hear about us'? However, when we sat in the intimate Femigra conference theatre, in Barcelona, in 2012, and shared pieces of our lives with a diverse and international audience, we were so happy to be immersed in a warm glow, when we heard their applause and then their words of appreciation and tears of acknowledgement, then, we knew, it had been the right thing to do. It has taken some time emotionally to come back to this and re-visit this through further reading and writing, but it has been a labour of love, which I dedicate to my Mum and Sister. I also recognise that this is my personal reflection and so may not resonate with everybody's experience, but, that's OK and I hope you enjoy reading it. Thank you
Gabrielle Hesk
University of Salford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gather in my name, my skin, my everything… (“Gather in my Name”: Maya Angelou, 1974), Qualitative Research Journal, August 2017, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/qrj-03-2017-0007.
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