My Welsh mother met my father during the war. From childhood, I have grown to dread the question: ‘Where are you from?’

My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?

I was in primary school the first time it happened. The boy who sat at the desk to my right – the one who used to pinch my arm whenever the teacher’s back was turned – finished talking about his father’s war experience of heat and flies and deserts while driving tanks across Egypt, and looked at me smugly as if to say, “Beat that.” It was my turn to describe my father’s contribution to the war effort. I stated clearly that my father served in the RAF. On the piano at home stood a photograph of a young man in RAF uniform, with an enigmatic smile, head tilted at a slightly rakish and daredevil angle, holding a pipe in his hand. In my eyes he was the epitome of wartime British heroism.

Before I could describe the photograph, I was interrupted by the teacher who told me to sit and listen carefully. I sat. The entire class was stunned. Silenced by her anger, they stared at me, the culprit, as the teacher issued a warning about the dire consequences of telling lies. She insisted that there were no “coloured” people in Britain during the war, that no coloured people served in any of the armed services, and certainly not in the RAF, the most elite branch of the British military.

Speaking in the slow and deliberate tone of voice that she adopted when she would brook no opposition, she declared that coloured people were not British, but immigrants who arrived on these shores after the war had been fought and won. We all shifted back in our seats, and I cowered in shock and humiliation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carby’s parents, Iris and Carl. Photograph: courtesy of Hazel Carby

Like other members of their generation, my parents processed their experiences of war through storytelling, and so constantly relived it. It was natural for my generation to recycle these memories, but here, for the first time, I learned they were dangerous.

This was my first introduction to British history. I had previously absorbed the fact that I was a “nigger”, a “wog”, “coloured” and “half-caste”. Now I learned that I was not considered British.

I was ostracised when I hesitantly explained where I came from. Early on, it became clear that staking a claim to Britishness risked a violent response. Eventually I was forced to fall silent.

My Welsh mother, Iris, was 19 when the second world war was declared in September 1939. My Jamaican father, Carl, had just turned 18. The war brought them together and left an indelible imprint on the adults they became. Iris worked in the Air Ministry and Carl was an airman in the RAF – serving his whole time in England and settling in the country after the war was over.

I was born in Devon in January 1948; in June of the same year, 492 passengers from Jamaica, carrying British passports, disembarked at Tilbury with the intention of joining the labour force that was to rebuild the devastated metropolitan heart of empire. Most of the passengers on the Empire Windrush were returning servicemen, but their service to Britain during the war was quickly forgotten, their claims to being as British as anyone else denied. Outside of my immediate family, it seemed as if the ship was remembered only as the first of many ships that carried racial problems into the country.

As soon as he left the RAF after the war, my father was regarded as one of these problems – as were my brother and I. My mother, meanwhile, was called a traitor to her race and a slut, because no respectable white woman would associate with, let alone marry, a Jamaican.

Every time I was asked where I was from, I was being asked to provide a reason for my being, which I did not have

After my school experiences, any demands to explain where I came from disconcerted me. My parents taught me to hold my head erect, to look directly at adults who addressed me, to smile with my eyes not just my teeth, to speak clearly, and to be conspicuously open, transparent and honest. My dad said that if I did not follow this advice I would be regarded as “shifty”, duplicitous and unworthy of attention. But I was unprepared for intense cross-examination about where I was from. I did not understand, until I was a teenager, that my father was coaching me in the art of being a “good” black girl, acceptable to white people.

The fact that I was born in England rendered me paradoxical. Adults and children alike considered the possibility of my Englishness derisory, deliberately perverse and misleading. Classmates would imitate the words of their parents: “Anyone can see that she is the wrong colour to be from around here, no matter what she says!”

Far more fearsome than leaving classmates dissatisfied was irritating a teacher, or any adult, who asked what I came to think of as The Question. Muttering about being born in England condemned me to utter disapproval and the exasperated demand: “But where did you come from before that?”

Every time I was asked where I was from, I was being asked to provide a reason for my being, which I did not have.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In my eyes, he was the epitome of wartime British heroism.’ Photograph: courtesy of Hazel Carby

I was cautious as I sought a way through this cultural maze, but when all the answers I could invent were rejected, I reluctantly had to acknowledge that I was being rebuffed for what I was. My chin sank into my chest, I mumbled and looked sideways out of the corner of my eyes. I became the uncooperative black girl my father did not wish me to be.

The demands that I account for my racial self as a child were contemptible. I stumbled for many years before I learned the difficult lesson that I was not accountable to those who questioned my right to belong. The Question can still rattle my world because there is no answer that can satisfy racist conjectures about the shades of brown in skin.

I have lived in the US since the 1980s, but even today, I find it hard to make myself legible to someone who asks The Question. If I fail to be satisfyingly “read”, the questioner is now in the awkward position of having to ask again, patiently repeating themselves in a louder and more forceful tone of voice, as if I was hard of hearing:

“Where are you from?”

Meaning, of course, are you black or white?

• Imperial Intimacies by Hazel Carby is published by Verso at £20. To order a copy for £17.60, go to guardianbookshop.com.

If you would like a comment on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).