The term ‘black Welsh’ remains for me a white person’s concept used to deny me my own experience of racial oppression… |
The term ‘black Welsh’ remains for me a white person’s concept used to deny me my own experience of racial oppression (the Welsh themselves, are an oppressed and colonised people). ‘Black Welsh’ is not an identity; on the contrary, it is a duality and a contradiction. Perhaps this explains to some extent the high incidence of schizophrenia among black people. If I claim to be Welsh when everyone can plainly see that I am ‘foreign’, I must be mad. But if I claim to be black, that has no significance, it’s just like having freckles, and if I claim to be oppressed, I’m playing the race card, demanding special treatment. So to survive, I must be nothing, invisible and above all silent, because my very existence is a reminder that at least one white Welsh woman had sex with a black man, and that is the beginning of the end of the purity of the Welsh people. And without the Language of Heaven, the Calon Lân, (white heart) the sense of being a chosen, Godly people, what does it mean to be Welsh?
Isabel Adonis, “Black Welsh Identity: the unspeakable speaks,” BBC News, North West Wales, May 30, 2006.
http://isabeladonis.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/black-welsh-identity-the-unspeakable-speaks/