My sister is an amazing aunty to my baby son. She is obsessed with him. So much so, she recently used some of her annual leave to take him on a day out. She was excited to show him off, proud to push him in his buggy and have people assume he was hers for a few hours. She never expected to be met with hostility and suspicion.
Like me, my sister is a Black mixed-race woman. My son is, at a glance, “white-presenting”, with blond hair and blue eyes. As they travelled together on the London underground, a woman looked at my son, looked at my sister and asked coldly: “Are you child-minding?” It was humiliating and invalidating. My sister scrambled to answer, not knowing what would happen if her status as blood relative wasn’t believed. Later, she told me she wished she hadn’t answered – why does a stranger have the right to question her in this way? – but in the moment, she felt rattled.
