Reflecting on my skin: growing up with racism in the UK
I’ll never forget the first time I got called a p*ki as a child.
I was 7 years old and walking to the shop. £1 coin held in my hand, my mum let me go down the road to buy some sweets. I was so excited: I was trusted to go beyond the safety of my home street. A big deal for 7-year-old Alex.
Standing by the automatic doors were 3 older kids. As I walked in, their gaze burning holes into my skull, one of them scowled and said the word under his breath. Like he was almost ashamed of it.
I was always told to be nice to everybody. But here, before I could say a word, I was hated. What did I do wrong? 28 years later, in 2024, I’m seeing and hearing the same words as I did in 1996.
As a child, you don’t understand why people throw words like p*ki at you.
You don’t understand why your skin, your heritage, could provoke such anger from total strangers. You don’t understand why your skin colour even matters. But to some people, it does matter, and that day in ’96 was just one of the countless times when I have been reminded of my “otherness”.
From being told to going back to my home country to having kids come up to me in a play area and tell me I’m from India: racism in the United Kingdom never went away, it’s just got a new platform and a new lick of paint.
And if anyone has ever asked you where you’re “from from,” you know how I feel.
“Haven’t you got a corner shop to work in?”
I was always the weird kid, and the colour of my skin made me even weirder.
I grew up in 1990s Eastbourne, a mostly white, average seaside town that was Conservative voting until the 2010s. In primary school, I was one of only 2 people of colour in my entire year group of 70. Kids would shout a racist chant whenever I asked to play with them.
As I moved up to secondary school, things didn’t improve. Racist attitudes followed me wherever I went.
I would stand outside a classroom, waiting for the previous lesson to finish, and a girl in the year above me would come and ask me whether I could “teach them Muslim”. I’d walk down a corridor and bump into someone by accident. Can you guess what they called me?
My “friends” would call me Abdul, because that was their default “generic foreigner” name. Get it? Because I’m brown?
Bullies, when doing the rounds picking on people, would look at me and say, “I don’t even know what you’re supposed to be”.
This happened so often, with no breaks, that I became conditioned to it. I would turn corners, enter rooms, meet new people, and expect someone to hate me for no reason other than I looked different.
And it hasn’t got any better. I’ve successfully interviewed for jobs and been told in my first week that I was a diversity hire.
One night out, I was chatting to a girl when she asked me if I was a Muslim. When I asked her “what makes you say that?” (ignoring the fact it was the colour of my skin), she backtracked and said “your eyelashes”.
I’m not even religious.
It changes the way you see the world
When you spend a huge part of your life pushed down for no other reason but your race, you develop habits.
Habits of fear.
I became so disgusted at who I saw in the mirror that I tried to hide my cultural brownness as much as I could.
I had internalised their racism and hated myself.
- I would avoid sitting next to other brown people on the bus in case people thought we were related and would target us.
- I’d watch TV I hated, looked up things I knew my friends liked in the hope I could appear as white as possible.
- I’d make sure in group settings I always talked, because if you’re brown and don’t contribute, you’re a foreigner who can’t speak English.
- I became hyper-vigilant when outside. Every look, every word said near me analysed to see whether I was in danger.
I erased my identity to fit in, and I could feel parts of myself slipping away. I was made to feel ashamed of myself, hiding a rich heritage and history.
But no amount of erasure can change the way you look.
Our work is far from over
Reading and watching the recent riots unfold over the past few weeks triggered something in me. Decades of racism and buried emotions resurfaced.
I consider myself lucky: the worst I got as a kid were some horrible words, being a social outcast and the occasional push into a wall. Not everyone is so fortunate.
But how messed up is it when I consider that a “good” type of racism? Even now, I try to downplay it. Maybe I deserved it? Maybe I did something?
But it’s all wrong.
Racist attitudes from the 90s are more prevalent than ever. The riots, the horrible words and actions towards marginalised communities have now set us back again. Once more, people of colour must watch their backs and fear going out. Families fear for the safety of their children, their businesses and the people they care about.
Some of us are told “you’re the good kind of immigrant because you’ve integrated!” or “oh, you don’t look that brown.”
They want to segregate us and make us fight each other.
Over the last ten years, I’ve unpicked the toxic attitudes and self-hatred I felt. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that, no matter how confident in your own skin you are, you will always be different. For better or for worse.
Just when you think everything’s going to be OK, you check the news. We still have a long way to go.
