How Tyla’s rise sparked a debate around racial identity

As popstar Tyla has shot to international fame, her identity as a coloured South African has sparked a debate over racial identity and self-identification in Black spaces. 

Tyla Laura Seethal, a 21-year-old from Johannesburg, is of Indian, Zulu, Mauritian and Irish descent. But some South Africans were outraged when a user on X, formerly Twitter, posted a now-deleted photo of her with Travis Scott and quipped it was the first time they had ever seen the rapper with a Black woman.

“Tyla is a COLOURED woman,” replied one user, using a term that is offensive to many Black Americans. “Tyla does not identify as Black.”

Sybil Roberts, director of African American and African diaspora studies at American University, said the conversation is complex, encompassing race, ethnicity and nationalism. 

The South African term “coloured,” Roberts told The Hill, created a group of individuals designated by a series of laws implemented by the National Party in the 1940s and codified by the Population Registration Act of 1950. The term applied to South Africans who weren’t native but also weren’t white.

“Typically, ‘native’ meant indigenous Black South Africans such as Zulu, Xhosa, etc. Ethnically, the ‘coloured’ were descended from two of the oldest cultures on the planet, the Khoi and the San, collectively referred to as the Khoisan,” she said.

“Over time, ‘coloured’ came to refer to mixed race South Africans, but this is controversial because of anti-miscegenation laws,” Roberts added. 

“So you have biracial and multiracial groups being designated as ‘coloured,’ but this is a malleable designation that during the apartheid years and shortly after was fraught with both legal and social challenges.”

One could be declared coloured by law and afforded the “rights” of coloured people, but people could also be stripped of that status and simply deemed “Black.”

In short, Northwestern University professor Arionne Nettles said, the racial classifications in South Africa essentially labeled people based on their proximity to whiteness. 

“A lot of those leaders of apartheid, we know that they studied child slavery in the United States and other types of forms of apartheid in other places in the world and they wanted to perfect it and make it better,” said Nettles, author of “We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything.”

“Their way to make it better was making colored people their own race and legally forcing them to be different and giving them different protections. The idea of more proximity to whiteness was a way to further separate people.” 

But for many Black Americans, the conversation draws forth a painful history of the identification of American “colored,” evoking images of a time of government-sanctioned racism, lynchings and overall terror.

“We have reasons though to be so on guard and to be so quick to jump to the worst, because a lot of times, we do feel as Black Americans that we are disrespected and disliked in our own country,” said Nettles.

Neither Tyla nor a representative for Epic Records responded to The Hill’s request for comment.

But stories about the “Water” singer’s success — including being part of an inaugural class of Grammy nominees in a new African music category — have people working to draw attention to the difference in “colored” terminology between the two cultures. 

Black Americans may cringe away from the word, said Whitney Pirtle, MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights, but in South Africa, the embracement of coloured is actually a reclamation of identity.

“Colored South Africans and Black South Africans in South Africa endured an extreme amount of racism,” said Pirtle, associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Merced. “It permeated all aspects of their lives. And so for some coloreds now, it’s sort of reclaiming the colored identity as something that has persisted — and that is not anti-Black.”

“I think it is an interesting counter-comparison to reclaiming of identity that, for some people, African American was the right and respectable way and now we’re like, ‘No, we’re Black,’” Pirtle continued. “Blackness means something to us, and I think the same thing is happening with the colored category that I think should translate across borders.”

And, Nettles pointed out, these conversations, with the help of technology, allow a deeper conversation around how white supremacy has impacted the ability for interracial unity as a whole. 

“For so long, we have operated in silos. Oppressed people from all backgrounds have not really always been able to see each other in that way,” said Nettles.

“Now we’re seeing more of a connection of oppressed people from across seas in a desire to understand what is happening to other people, and finding sort of similarities and what some of that oppression looks like. It is becoming a time where, as we knock down a lot of these walls with the help of technology, we are able to really connect and see ourselves and other people in other places in a way that maybe we just did not before.”