“You always wonder what race you belong to,” Gigi says of her mixed background. Mother Yolanda is Dutch and white, father Mohammed is Palestinian. “Sometimes I feel too white to stand up for Arab affairs. Is what I am enough to do what feels right? Or am I abusing the privileges I have because of my white side? Can I talk about one side of myself, or am I talking about something that I don’t experience enough?”
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It’s a topic the model often discusses with friend Zayn Malik, who has a Pakistani father and a British mother. “We are the first generation of those mixed ethnicities, we both have that experience of being a bridge between the different cultures. Our parents never experienced that themselves.”
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Gigi is looking forward to seeing daughter Khai, now nine months old, looking at that in the future. “I think she will find her own way of bringing her different cultures together. I think it would be interesting to have those conversations with her, to see her take on it.”
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