Hybrid, not product

The room

April 2021, my flat in Stratford, a podcast I was a guest on, a sofa, three microphones, a plant. I was at university and I had a TikTok. Nothing the film is about had happened yet.

Early on I was introduced, kindly, as the product of an interracial relationship. I’d been called a hybrid before that, which is a word for cars. So I graded them: hybrid to product was an improvement. It got a laugh, which is what it was for.

Seventy-three minutes later the same word came back as a sign-off — follow the product — and I heard myself correct it without thinking: hybrid, not product. And then, because the whole episode had been about who mixed people are allowed to be, I said the sentence I had been circling for an hour and twenty minutes: I identify with my black side. I said “to clarify” twice. I wanted it on the record before the record stopped.

I did not know I was building a record. I know it now. It shows the thing the rest of the archive keeps proving: I named myself on tape before anyone else got the chance.