For her part, Lawton went along with the story because she loved her father. But as she notes: “Ideas from our parents about who we are form the backbone of our identities, the bedrock to personal truths that we can recite and remember like prayers from church or poems from school.” And hers was rooted in a denial of how the rest of the world saw her. “Race was dogged in its desperate pursuit of me,” she writes. “And as much as I tried to brush it off, as much as I tried to believe what I was told, race attached itself to me, a little more, year on year.” This dissonance, a “dull roar in the background” of her childhood, grew into “a persistent buzz” at the back of her brain by the time she was a teenager.
Yup. I experienced that as well. And this is what I tell most people about it: race, racism, cultural differences are not something we look after. It finds us and tells us that we’re deemed inferior. So we fight back.
Shortly after her father died of cancer in 2015, Lawton learned through DNA testing that she wasn’t his biological child. In fact, she was 43 percent Nigerian. The revelation inspires Lawton to live in Black communities in Brooklyn, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, only to bump up against the same European beauty standards that she tried and failed to adhere to growing up in her white English village.
It’s interesting. It’s similar yet different from my own path on this. The lack of black folks around me pushed me to be curious and go live in a blacker community, for sure. The way my white friends dismissed Trayvon’s murder and so many things compounded to lead me to get some Black Air, you know? I needed it.
The European beauty standards never hit me because well I’m a dude, it’s very low pressure compared to women. I never rated European beauty standards over others, though. 90s supermodels? Well Naomi was killing everyone even when my friends were telling me she wasn’t. They were simply wrong. I’ve always had strong resilience to peer pressure, I put that on France’s values (at that time) and my own internal, constant questioning.
I can’t wait to work on my book and have y’all read it. The draft is still good when I peruse it, and there’s SO much more than I can add. It’s going to be amazing.