Davina Moon is an actress and a mother – she has a role in the upcoming James Bond film, and had a small part in the recent live action Aladdin remake.
As a mixed-race actress she says she has to be wary of being cast as the ‘token ethnic’.
‘When someone asks me where I’m from, I genuinely have no idea what they actually mean,’ Davina tells Metro.co.uk.
‘I have to ask them to specify if they mean where do I live, where I was born, or what is my racial mix (I’ve been asked what “combination” am I?).
‘Or maybe they’ve detected something in my accent – I spent a considerable amount of my childhood in Australia and some of the accent has stuck with me.’
If people are asking about her genetic makeup, Davina keeps things simple by telling them she is Irish and Sri Lankan. Which is true, but isn’t the whole story.
‘My mum is part Irish, part German, part Russian Jewish with Spanish thrown in, and my dad is part Sri Lankan, part Indian and part Portuguese,’ she explains.
‘Being mixed-race has two sides to its coin. It’s great to be made up of such different cultures and beliefs but on the other hand, you can be left not identifying as either.
‘I’ve spent so much emotional and psychological energy trying to be accepted. I’ve stopped now. I am who I am.’
Davina’s daughter doesn’t look like her. She’s blonde with hazel eyes. Which doesn’t both Davina in the slightest, but it seems to give strangers the right to question her legitimacy as a mother.
‘I am well aware that we don’t look alike,’ says Davina, ‘but, just in case, some members of society like to remind me of this.
‘I’ve gone to pick her up from nursery and the nursery teacher, holding her, has recoiled as I went to take her.
‘Another time, during a church service, a woman in front of us kept turning back to look at us. At the end of the service, she turned to my daughter, then aged three, and asked her; “is this your mummy?” and then left, without acknowledging me.’
There was another incident recently where Davina was kneeling by her daughter at an after school activity when another mother asked her if a child with brown skin, who was in a different room at the time, was hers.
‘I said she wasn’t,’ says Davina, ‘I said that the child I was tending to, although she didn’t look like me, was mine, and that just because the other little girl and I had a similar skin colour, did not mean we were related.
‘Her defences went up and all she kept repeating was: “I don’t see skin colour. I don’t see skin colour”.
‘A short time later I came back into the room to hostility from her and her friends. She was the victim and, clearly, I was the bad guy.
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‘It soon becomes water off a duck’s back, but the odd occasion which makes your eyes well up or your blood boil, does sneak through.’
In her professional life, Davina started getting seen for Asian roles in TV shows early on, she thinks the whole industry still has work to do to become truly inclusive.
‘All of a sudden I was in shows wearing a sari or a salwar kameez and finding myself straightening my incredibly naturally curly hair to try and conform to the Asian stereotype,’ she explains.
‘I had a good run of shows, but my breakthrough came when I was cast in a production which required the role to be half Indian half Welsh. That almost never happens.
‘It didn’t matter how I wore my hair as I had a wig fixed in a 1940’s style. Again, being of colour and in a period piece also almost never happens.
‘Since then I have mostly been seen for roles using “colour blind” casting, (which in itself is a whole other conversation!)
‘It’s getting better in acting and performance, you still have shows which have their “token ethnics” though, so you know your chances of getting that job are much slimmer than if you were white.’
When Davina was younger she didn’t identify with one side of her heritage over another. She said one of the reasons for the relative disconnect with her dad’s side was the language barrier.
‘My brother and I never learnt our dad’s language, Sinhalese. He refused to teach us. I can only imagine it was because he is of the generation where ethnic minorities wanted acceptance for their children that they never had.
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‘So we were Westernised as much as possible. But unfortunately that meant we were alienated further from one half of our culture.’
Davina had aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends who all spoke a language she wasn’t privy to.
‘Even when my late paternal grandmother tried to teach us, we would show our dad what we’d learnt but he never commended our efforts,’ Davina adds. But she doesn’t entirely blame her dad for his actions.
‘My parents came to England at a time when it was common to see signs that read: “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. So even my mum would compare me to my white, English contemporaries.
‘I was never as good or as clever as anyone else. I know it’s because she wanted me to be the best I could be, but my journey was never going to be the one she wanted me to take.
Davina thinks her parents had an acute awareness of the fact that they were bringing children into the world who would need to be prepared for external negativity, but she doesn’t have the same approach for her own kids.
‘I now lavish so much praise on my children, I think I have to be careful it doesn’t have a reverse effect.’
Her parents were right in a way, Davina has experienced negativity. At various points in her life she has noticed overt racism or covert microaggressions. But when she spoke to her parents about this, their advice wasn’t always what she wanted to hear.
‘When I was about seven or eight, I was at a day camp in the school holidays,’ she remembers. ‘There was an older white boy who had said to me; “when you smile at night, all you can see is your teeth!”
‘While it didn’t sit right, and not really understating what he meant, I wanted to be accepted by him and all the other kids so I laughed along.
‘I went home and told my mum what he said and her response was that next time I should say to him, when he smiles in the day, you can’t see him at all. This also didn’t sit right. Even at that age I knew it was wrong to fight negative with negative.
‘Regardless, I never saw him again. It saddens me that children from such a tender age experience such unkindness. I’ve seen enough young children to know that they are not born or choose to discriminate, it is something they learn from others, usually at home.
‘Even though I have had my own experiences of racism or racial preconceptions, I am fully aware that there are those who have experienced far worse than I ever have and possibly will.’
One of Davina’s defence mechanisms is humour. She figured out that making people laugh can be a pretty satisfying substitute for acceptance.
‘It is a skill I developed at a young age,’ she explains. ‘My family moved around a little, which meant I went to eight different schools. Eight times being the gawky, brown, new girl.
‘Each night before I started, I would go through the worst case scenarios and the best case scenarios.
‘Evidently, I found that I would get admiration and attention (which I confused for acceptance) when I made people laugh. So that is the mask I wore.’
She says becoming an actor is the perfect embodiment of her life-long craving for acceptance – in some ways she still feels like she is wearing that mask she hid behind at school.
At the same time, she now believes that he has a strong sense of who she is and is conscious of passing on this sense of self-worth to the next generation.
‘I love being mixed-race, but then, it’s all I know to be,’ says Davina. ‘It’s taken me a long time to accept who I am and I’m just glad that came before I had children, as I wouldn’t want to project any confusion or insecurities on to them.
‘I have so many mixed race friends and I often wonder if we are drawn to each other because of this commonality – the fact that we have all been exposed to multiple cultures.
‘I find myself celebrating Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah, Chinese new year and so many more, as that is what I have been brought up with.’
Davina’s wedding was the best example of this. Her husband is from Cornwall and that is where the ceremony took place. The night before the wedding they had a Mendhi ‘of sorts’ as Davina describes it.
On the day of the event, guests were encouraged to wear sari’s and shalwars. There was an Asian buffet and the couple served Guinness and champ, passionfruit cordial and Cornish pasties.
‘I understand why a lot of people of mixed heritage are uncomfortable with being asked where they’re from, but I’m still conflicted by it,’ says Davina.
‘Part of me thinks, you shouldn’t be seeing me as anything other than a person and it shouldn’t matter “where I’m from”, as it means you are making a judgement and pigeonholing me.
‘But on the other hand, I’m thinking, we should all have an interest in where each other are from, and what we bring to society as we live in such a rich, diverse melting pot of a world.’
Davina is passionate that nobody should be defined by the colour of their skin, the country they’re born in, the language they speak or the god they worship.
‘If anything, we should be defined by what is in our hearts and minds,’ she says.
‘I have recently acquired a copy of Self Portrait In Black And White by Thomas Chatteron Williams who calls for us to consider why we uphold race categories defined “using plantation logic” and encourages us to do away with the arbitrary nomenclature altogether.
‘I think he has a point.’
Davina will be appearing in The Snow Queen at The Rose Theatre, Kingston from December.
Mixed Up
Mixed Up is our weekly series that gets to the heart of what it means to be mixed-race in the UK today.
Going beyond discussions of divided identity, this series takes a look at the unique joys, privileges and complexities that come with being mixed-race - across of variety of different contexts.
The mixed-race population is the UK's fastest-growing ethnic group, and yet there is still so much more to understand about the varied lived experiences of individuals within this hugely heterogenous group.
Each week we speak to the people who know exactly how it feels to navigate this inbetween space.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/06/mixed-up-my-daughters-teacher-recoiled-when-i-tried-to-take-her-because-i-dont-look-like-her-11012410/
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