‘That is my Star of David’

Sarah’s words evoke a truism about being Black in contemporary Britain: skin signifies. It is a mark of ethnicity, status, identity, self-hood. Her words speak of the continuation of the ‘racial epidermal schema’ highlighted by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks (1986: 112). In the colonial context, he argues, Black others bear, ‘the burden of that corporeal malediction’ provided by, ‘the white man, who had woven [him] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ (Fanon 1986: 111). Through the discursive construction of difference that emanates from the dominant culture, Black women and men continue to be placed as other: as Black others imprisoned by discourses of skin.