Ruth Negga: ‘People who say they don’t consider skin colour... are you f**king blind?’

Ruth Negga photographed by Chantal Anderson/New York Times, London and now LA, I’m curious to know more about her thoughts on identity.

Negga refuses to be fixed or framed by others’ need to reduce complexity into simple categorisation. She has said she doesn’t “trust anyone who doesn’t change their mind”.describing why he writes: “I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.

London, on the other hand, was a different story. “Being black and Irish in London wasn’t great. I did my secondary school education in London and being black and Irish in the 1990s wasn’t fun.” When I laugh, she points out that she doesn’t think saying that is “harsh or flippant”. “I find it patronising and it’s an erasure, of self, in order to be this thing, you have to get rid of that thing which to me goes back to the kind of self defining.”

I start to feel like I’m in a therapy session, or perhaps with one of the imaginary black Irish girlfriends I longed for, but never had growing up. 'Audre Lorde [reminds us that] the transformation of silence into language and action, that’s our duty… Your silence will not protect you.

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