{"id":336,"date":"2021-07-26T15:51:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T14:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/?p=336"},"modified":"2024-11-02T15:53:27","modified_gmt":"2024-11-02T15:53:27","slug":"i-am-deeply-mancunian-on-a-molecular-level-speaking-to-natalie-morris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/?p=336","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI am deeply Mancunian on a molecular level\u201d: Speaking to Natalie Morris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We spoke to journalist and writer Natalie Morris about her game-changing book Mixed\/Other, what Northernness means to her, and what a diverse and equal media landscape would look like.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Natalie Morris is an engaging, charismatic and tenacious voice in the UK media scene. I came across her at first through her Metro lifestyle reporting<\/u><\/a>, which covers a huge range of topics and has featured a number of very influential articles on racism, mental health and feminist issues. More recently, I struck upon her new book Mixed\/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain<\/em>, a hugely engaging and game-changing text on the experiences of Britons of mixed heritage. She wrote the book during the pandemic and alongside her full-time job, but reflected on the experience with an infectious enthusiasm, energy and evident excitement, saying that \u201cit was incredible as an experience to voice these things that have been inside me forever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the process of researching for Mixed\/Other<\/em>, Natalie interviewed more than 50 mixed Britons from a huge range of backgrounds in order to draw inspiration and understanding from a vast panorama of people. I was interested in what this felt like as an emotional experience, applying her own experiences and relating to the people she interviewed as well as retaining an empirical approach. She emphasised that the book was always going to be foregrounded in the personal: \u201cI think this makes for a more interesting book. I didn\u2019t want it to read like an academic study- I wanted it to be about lived experiences and actual people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the process of engaging with such a huge diversity of stories, she underlined that the people she was interviewing came first: \u201cfrom the feedback of people I\u2019ve spoken to and the things that they\u2019ve told me about the importance of feeling their own experiences seen and reflected, I knew I really wanted to prioritise that.\u201d But she also described the experience of speaking to them as very personally meaningful, remarking that \u201cas a personal experience, it was a real learning curve, because whenever you go into a project like this you\u2019re inevitably blinkered by your own narrow experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cthere is a kind of resistance in being joyful, in proudly claiming space \u2013 and this is a feeling I found really strongly in most people I spoke to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For her, some of the best elements of this process were speaking to older people and to people who are mixed without whiteness: \u201chaving done those interviews, I made a conscious effort within the book to try to undermine this focus on whiteness that we have whenever we talk about race, but particularly when we talk about mixedness, because it always comes back to whiteness as the default.\u201d She also learned a lot from talking to mixed people who pass as white: \u201cthey spoke about a lot of relatable experiences which often aren\u2019t given very much space in conversations about race, and I really wanted to tackle that head-on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to know more about the role that happiness played in her book. It\u2019s a read that doesn\u2019t shy away from covering a wide spectrum of experience with real candour, clinically dissecting the inadequacies of the ways we talk about race, whilst simultaneously highlighting the vibrancy and joy of a mixed heritage. She concurred, stating \u201cI wanted this to be a holistic representation of mixedness \u2013 it isn\u2019t just one thing or one homogenous experience.\u201d She added that \u201cthere is a kind of resistance in being joyful, in proudly claiming space \u2013 and this is a feeling I found really strongly in most people I spoke to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She aims in her book to push back against unbalanced media coverage of mixedness, which focuses overwhelmingly on the negative aspects of that experience: \u201cin mainstream media spaces, we get so caught up in the negative experiences and trauma stories \u2013 they\u2019re the headlines that go viral. We live in an outrage culture, so as a result media, books and even creative projects feed into that. People are pushed in that direction by their editors. But there is so much more to the story than this outrage, and it does a massive disservice if you frame the mixed experience simply in terms of the old stereotypes of confusion, of not fitting in, of trauma, of being pushed out from both sides. There obviously is that aspect \u2013 people told me those stories too \u2013 but the joy that exists also needs to be given space.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cthere are huge structural problems that aren\u2019t being acknowledged”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

On a less joyful note, I asked her about her experiences in journalism and in publishing her book as someone who doesn\u2019t come from the sphere of white, privately-educated Londoners who dominate those industries. She agreed that \u201cthere are huge structural problems that aren\u2019t being acknowledged\u201d. She noted that elitism and cronyism are so deep-seated that \u201cthere really is a different level of privilege in these spaces\u201d – despite acknowledging her own privilege of having come from a middle-class background and being educated at a grammar school and a red-brick university, this is hardly even a leg-up in an industry where untempered white, rich, London-centric privilege and nepotism are so rampant. Even when non-white people are given the opportunity to work for big media organisations, they rarely occupy positions of seniority, because \u201cthey are being brought into institutions that are not set up to help them thrive or succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also emphasised that exclusion and obstruction come from external, as well as internal sources. Online abuse and trolling are rife, and can escalate quickly into more sinister and threatening attention, particularly for writers and journalists of colour. She recalled one incident of having to speak to anti-terror police because of being doxed on a far-right website, emphasising with a dry laugh that \u201cI\u2019m a lifestyle journalist. I think about my white colleagues who don\u2019t have to go through that, and I think about the fact that there isn\u2019t enough support because the people with power in the newsroom often don\u2019t recognise this as a significant problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are both hopeful for a more equitable and diverse future media landscape where stories would be covered by people with a stake in shaping honest and reflective narratives. \u201cEvery time I\u2019ve met a journalist who is reporting on a story they have a lived experience with, or a community they\u2019re actually from, they care deeply and want to cause positive change,\u201d Natalie added. With a wider range of experiences reflected in the newsroom, \u201cwe would have stories that were more considered, less clickbait-focused, stories with a cultural understanding and the nuance needed to make these debates less cyclical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We finished on an even more positive note, bonding over our shared Mancunian identity. She has lived in London for nine years now, but said that \u201cmy heart is in Manchester and always will be. Being Northern has shaped who I am and what I stand for.\u201d She emphasised that \u201cLondon is an amazing city because it\u2019s full of everyone, but most of the people in London aren\u2019t originally from London- they\u2019re from everywhere. Mancunians are Mancunians through and through.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also bond over our mutual adoration of Shirley May, iconic Northern poet and educator, who is related to Natalie. A giant of the creative scene in Manchester, Natalie praised Shirley warmly: \u201cshe does amazing things in the creative space and has cultivated and created some amazing communities, inspiring so many young people in the process.\u201d It\u2019s a lovely and strangely cyclical note to end on: Shirley is also the person who guided me into the creative scene in Manchester, taught me about all of the amazing creative opportunities available there and gave me confidence in myself as a writer. Like Natalie, she is an iconic Northern figure and a role model for a huge number of people, particularly young people, looking to have their voices heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was as much a joy and a revelation to speak to Natalie as it was to read Mixed\/Other<\/em>, a text I can unreservedly recommend. At SINK<\/em>, we are always looking to celebrate Northern excellence: this is the first fixture in what we hope will become a series of interviews with iconic figures from the North, and for us, there could have been no better way to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy Mixed\/Other<\/em> here<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy Shirley May\u2019s poetry collection She Wrote Her Own Eulogy <\/em>here<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We spoke to journalist and writer Natalie Morris about her game-changing book Mixed\/Other, what Northernness means to her, and what a diverse and equal media landscape would look like. Natalie Morris is an engaging, charismatic and tenacious voice in the UK media scene. I came across her at first through her Metro lifestyle reporting, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinkmagazine.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}