‘I love Mum, but I needed to know where I come from’

As a mixed-race child adopted into a white family, Emma Johnson started to question her identity when she hit her teens. But would tracking down her birth parents mean betraying her devoted adoptive mother Jill Firth?

Emma Johnson, 43, is a baker and lives in Leeds with her son Jaydan, 18

When I was little, there was one particular bedtime story I never tired of hearing. It was the one about a room filled with cribs, each with a newborn baby inside, and out of all those babies my mum chose me. I’d drift off to sleep smiling, feeling incredibly special.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was adopted. It would’ve been impossible to keep it secret; my skin colour in a white family is an obvious clue.

Mum never hid the truth from me. She framed my adoption at six weeks old so positively ‒ something wonderful that had happened to her ‒ rather than focusing on the sad flipside that another mother had given me away.

I knew from my adoption file, which Mum showed me from an early age, that my birth father was black and my birth mother white ‒ just 17 when she had me in 1978.

For a long time, that information was enough. I was content with who I was and how I came to be Mum’s daughter.

I grew up in a rural village in West Yorkshire. People are often surprised when I tell them I rarely experienced racism as a child. Mostly, it was a very protective, loving bubble and although I knew I looked different, it didn’t matter to me and it didn’t matter at home where I always felt as much my parents’ child as my brother Matthew, now 46, and sister, Abigail, 40. We were loved and disciplined the same and attended a local private school together.

However, as I got older, I began searching for a link to where I came from. I would record videos of black people on TV and rewatch the clips, fascinated to see others who looked like me. Things like Mum being able to wash and brush Abi’s hair, while mine was relaxed by an Afro-caribbean hairdresser, were subtle reminders there were other people more like me than my family.

The first time I really felt affected by racism was when I was 17 and, ironically, it was out of the mouths of black people. I’d gone to college in Leeds and felt excited about being among black and mixed-race students for the first time. I wanted to fit in but they rejected me, calling me a ‘coconut’ – black on the outside, white on the inside – and ‘posh’. I didn’t speak their slang and compared to many of them I’d had a privileged upbringing. It felt like they refused to accept me as one of them.

For the first time in my life I began to question my identity. I wasn’t white like my family, nor was I black enough for the community I biologically belonged to. So who was I and where did I fit in?

I felt lost and although Mum was always