On Thursday's episode of The Breakfast Club radio show, Tyla refused to answer a question she had addressed publicly at least twice before: What does it mean that she calls herself a colored woman from South Africa? Of course, controversial host Charlamagne the God framed the question amid a tense debate that has erupted around her racial identity since the 22-year-old Grammy winner took the world by storm with “Water.”
“School me into these conversations they're having,” he said, prefacing his question. In response, Tyla looked behind her and an off-screen voice answered for the singer and said, “Can't we please?” Charlamagne agreed to go ahead, but indicated that the moment would remain in the published interview. “Next please,” the voice asked after Tyla looked back again.
The conversation in question is one that questions Tyla's blackness as a woman of color and has not always made room for differences in racial identity in different parts of the world. After the Breakfast Club interview came out, Tyla took to X, formerly Twitter, with one screenshot from an iPhone note to explain: “Hey guys,” he says. “I have never denied my blackness, where it came from… I am mixed black/Zulu, Irish, Mauritian/Indian and Coloured.” She described her “colored” identity as unique to where she comes from. “I don't expect to be recognized as Colored outside of [South Africa] from anyone who doesn't feel comfortable doing so because I understand the weight of that word outside of SA. But, to close this discussion, I am both a colored person in South Africa and a black woman. As a woman of culture, it is “and”, not “or”. It ended with an enthusiastic 'Asambe': Zulu for 'Let's go!'
As hinted, some American observers received offense to Tyla calling herself Colored, because in the US, and without that crucial (but undetectable in live speech) “u”, colored is a derogatory term for Black since the racist Jim Crow era. In South Africa, however, “Colored” means that someone is of mixed race, most often including white and native African or Southeast Asian. And, as racial identity does in America, “colored” also signifies a sociopolitical position. that a person was likely also descended from people from different class backgrounds. During South Africa's violently racist apartheid regime that lasted until 1991, people of color, like black Africans there, were stripped of many rights to land, voting, work and security.
In a TikTok from 2020, long before her international fame, but re-released since then, Tyla put her hair in the Bantu knots of the native African Zulu and proudly explained that as a woman of color in South Africa, her heritage is multicultural ( although perhaps better to say it as polynational since culture and race or ethnicity are not always synonymous). To put it in American terms: she's mixed or bisexual… but she is not American and doesn't usually call herself that. The idea that she doesn't identify as Black not at all it may have gained ground because it does not identify as Black in; This specific TikTok.
what she he's got she said, however, and reiterated, is that she never denied her blackness – people on the internet did it for her. “I'm happy that a conversation is happening and that people are learning that Africa is not just black and white. Obviously, it gets messy and nobody likes that, but I'm glad people know we exist and we have our own culture,” she said, discussing her race and the fervor surrounding it. Cosmopolitan. “I just grew up as a South African knowing myself as a Coloured. And now that I'm exposed to more things, it's made me do other things as well.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tyla-ethnicity-the-breakfast-club-interview-1235039923/
