As a child, I had this problem. I really wanted people to like me. I would copy the accents of people I wanted to be friends with. I would say I liked the bands that they liked. I would copy their meals in the lunch queue at school.
And then there was the time that I started pretending I was white. I mean, I am technically a bit white. My mum is half white. But that doesn’t make me half white, although that’s what I told everyone.
It had started the summer that I was seven, and had gone back to my mum’s hometown of Portsmouth, as I did every year. I had this one friend there who was a few years older than me, and I thought she was really cool. That year, things felt different. As we hung out in our regular spot under a tree in the park, she asked me:
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
“You know, being brown?”
“Erm, well I don’t really know because I guess I’ve always been brown.”
“OK … Well, if I had the choice, I know I wouldn’t choose it.”
I remember that instant so well. I felt this hot sensation, as though all my tears had met up in my toes and decided to march up my body in protest. They would swell in my chest and scream in my throat, but by the time they got to my eyes they were quiet. That was the moment that changed me: the moment that I knew that people didn’t like me because of my skin colour. And I decided that I wouldn’t let it faze me. I denied it.
I would return to school after that summer and hear the white kids in my east London playground singing “APPLE – All Pakis Please Leave England!”
I would laugh with them and tell them how cool I thought it was that they had made a poem where the first word was spelled out by first letters of the other words. They stopped singing it.
The word makes me cringe now, but as a kid I was used to it. Accompanying a brick thrown while I was crossing the road outside the mosque, or hearing it from other children’s parents when I was at the park on my own – it was always served with the same outrage at my very existence. I would always respond with nonchalance.
People sometimes say that racism doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s true that I haven’t experienced it in that way since the 1990s. When I was young, my brothers would scrap on hot concrete with boys who had used the dirty word, and I would watch in a fizzy daze as they were hit over their heads with cricket bats. When we were kids, I remember my brother dangling a boy off Southend pier after he called us that word, my brother yelling: “How does it feel knowing your country’s being taken over by us, mate?”
Those things made us feel powerful, as though racism wasn’t real because it wasn’t hurting us. But while it was easier to make light of horrifically racist comments, the more subtle ones are harder to get your head around. Ignoring it meant I couldn’t make clear in my own head what was wrong about it.
When I went on holiday, I would hide away from the sun because I didn’t want to be darker. I would talk to boys on the internet and send them black and white pictures of myself where I looked paler. Aged 15, I would scrub my knees with a Brillo pad to try to make them less dark.
In those horrible, pubescent years when boys started to watch porn, the racial undertones were uncomfortable. Friends would bully one another if they didn’t have a preference for what they called “pink”. They would ridicule the nonwhite women, who they said had large nipples that were too dark.
Like all women blighted by the unrealistic expectations of porn, I internalised those remarks as something undesirable about me. But where do you go with that when you can’t change the colour of your nipples, or vagina? The rare times I did object, they would retort that they didn’t like blonde girls either. It was just a taste.
The thing is, to them it was an isolated incident – just “their opinion”. But when you’re on the other side, it’s an addition to a lifetime’s worth of reminders that the colour of your skin is unpalatable.
The moment that changed me again was when I realised that ignoring racism no longer made me strong; it made me vulnerable to its effects. My resolve as a seven-year-old had helped me through becoming an adult, but now that I actually was one it was time to face up to the facts. Ignoring racism didn’t make people like me more: it just made me hate myself. Racism was real, and I wasn’t going to deny it anymore.
