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Tyla Knows She’s Black, Guys. She Doesn’t Know Why People Say Otherwise

When she declined to discuss her Coloured ethnicity on 'The Breakfast Club,' it reignited discourse around it

Of course, controversial host Charlamagne tha God framed the query in context of tense discourse that’s erupted around her racial identity since the 22 year-old Grammy winner took the world by storm with “ Water.” As she alludes to, some American observers have taken offense to Tyla calling herself Coloured, because in the US, and without that crucial (but undetectable in live speech) “u,” colored is a dismissive term for Black from the racist Jim Crow era. In a TikTok from 2020, far predating her international fame but recirculated since, Tyla put her hair in the Bantu knots of her indigenously African Zulu people and proudly explained that as a Coloured woman in South Africa, her heritage is multicultural (though perhaps better said as multi ethnic since culture and race or nationality are not always synonymous).

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