The argument around Tyla denying her Blackness arguably began after a TikTok she made in 2020 was recirculated after the 22-year-old Grammy-winning artist found more fame. In the video, she refers to herself as a “Coloured South African,” explaining that term means she comes “from a lot of different cultures,” and that in her family, “one of those cultures [is] Zulu.”
In America, the term “colored” without the letter u is a slur from the Jim Crow era. Hearing Tyla refer to herself as such has caused confusion and pain amongst American audience members who are unaware of the history of the term elsewhere in the world. “Coloured” is also a vestige of racial segregation; according to BBC, in South Africa, Coloured people belong to an ancestral, multiracial community legally established during the violent system of Apartheid in South Africa, following the Population Registration Act of 1950’s requiring of people to…