Photo credit: Alexandra Cameron
I’m not sure when I was first aware that my skin colour was something that marked me as different, as something less attractive, but I’m pretty sure it was when I was five or six, on the school playground in a predominantly white school in Kent. There was a before and after.
The before was when I was a kid like any other, with nothing marking me as less than, with a body that had no borders. And the after, was being aware that I possessed something that wasn’t palatable, and it was so fused to my being that the sensation was akin to being inside a house in broad daylight and watching the shutters come down on all the windows.
We were playing kiss chase, where we’d run around after the object of our desire, trying to kiss them. For most of the girls this was a boy named Adam. As we were waiting to run on the playground, I remember saying something about how nice Adam was, and I remember someone saying something along the lines of how they didn’t think he’d like me back because the colour of my skin was brown. The words are smudged with the rust of time, so I can’t quite pick them out clearly, but I knew what was being said.
I’m not going to roll out my list of racist experiences because a) every person of colour (POC) has them b) I have no desire to display my trauma in order to be believed and c) it’s a bummer. But I do know that there is a before and after in how I respond when someone is confronting me in a racist manner as an adult, and the recent race riots in the UK have forced me to consider exactly how.
Most racism these days, especially in England which long perfected the art of subtle racism, tends to be less about slurs and yelling. It’s more about gaslighting and structural racism by a thousand cuts.
Spending my teenage years in a predominantly white school and a fairly racist part of Kent meant that by the time I went to university, my internalised sense of shame and embarrassment I felt about being South Asian was so acute, I shunned their various societies at Freshers Fair and joined the Hispanic society. I would simper and coo when someone mistook me for being Brazilian rather than Indian, because we were told that Indians smelled, that they were ugly and nerdy, and given that the mainstream shorthand was fucking Apu from The Simpsons, wanted to be anything but.
I’ve experienced this sense of structural and invisible racism and bias both intrinsically and extrinsically more than I’ve had slurs yelled at me, however, the last two weeks saw a return to the bad old days of potentially getting your head kicked in with race riots across the UK with the exception of Scotland.
Although the riots are said to have been quelled for now, they brought up a lot of awful things for people who are visibly black and brown in the UK. Aside from the fact that events like these dredge up old traumas, they immediately winch us back to a visceral, primal form of fear – being attacked on the basis of your skin colour. It is near impossible to explain what this feels like to white people, and the rising bile of how unfair this all feels, and how circular the conversations are around race, is hard to push down.
Something that has helped was seeing people of all races at the counter protests which not only helped squash the riots but also provided a glimmer of hope in thinking that perhaps things are changing. People shouldn’t get claps for not being racist, but seeing the bravery of some white folks as they confronted the far right, shifted something for me.
I was still in the UK when the riots kicked off, but had left the country for a holiday during the period when they escalated. While I was away, I was reading everything around the riots, and most importantly how black, brown and Muslim people in particular were feeling, and what they were experiencing. Britain loves to tell you that it isn’t racist, but most POCs know that it is, and that this sits as a thick, oily layer beneath the surface. And it’s these people, the oily pricks who might not have charged at a police officer but do feel emboldened to use slurs and tell you to ‘go home’, who were coming out of the woodwork.
While I was processing all of it, I realised that I was a different person to the one who had experienced racism in the past, and indeed, when we had the last set of race riots in 2011. I was taught to behave, play along, stay quiet, stay meek, don’t say anything back. We learn this from a young age. If you are a POC, you will know that there are certain groups of people that make you feel uncomfortable based on things you have experienced in the past. The feeling is indescribable, but it’s a combination of feeling sick and small, and frozen.
But when I was thinking about all of this while on holiday, I wasn’t feeling sick or small – I felt angry. I thought about what I would do if someone confronted me, and I thought about what I did three years ago when someone called me the P word, and I yelled at the person to SHUT THE FUCK UP, took a picture of them and reported it to the police.
And then, to soothe that anger, I thought of love. I thought of how much I loved my community, and how proud I am of us to continue to excel, shine and thrive despite all of this. I thought of the people I came from, the things I have achieved, how proud I am of those of who are visible and hold the doors of industry open for each other. And I thought of the fact that I am physically fucking strong, and also started wrestling and Brazilian jiu jitsu and while I am still terrible at both, I feel better equipped physically than I did 13 years ago.
So I wondered. I wondered when I returned from holiday, how I would feel going about my day, especially since so many POC I know reported feeling hyper-vigilant, scared and exhausted even though the riots have eased off. I was determined I wouldn’t – these fuckers were not going to get the better of me.
But the moment I landed back in London, and I went on the London Underground, that armour began to dissolve. Was that person staring at me? Would someone say something? And whenever I saw a group of black and brown people, I felt relieved. Safer.
This is SHIT, I said to myself. Trying to snap myself out of it, I put some heavy metal on (Hatebreed), and arranged my body language in a ‘don’t fuck with me’ way (shoulders straight, arms out). And no one fucked with me. But by the time I got home, I was exhausted.
The next day, I went to a festival to see Korn, one of my favourite childhood bands. I was waiting to meet my friend
(who has written an excellent piece on this topic). While I was waiting for Anita, surrounded by a sea of mostly white people, I wanted to ask them – did you feel safe coming here? Did you wonder if anyone was going to yell at you?For most of the day, I forgot about it, and felt okay, and lost myself in that beautiful collective experience of music and connection. We sang the same songs, it felt pure and wonderful. Until it came time to go home, and I realised I’d have to pick my way alone, in the dark, through the park, and get to the train station. I realised I wasn’t worried about being a woman and being safe. I was worried about being South Asian and being safe.
Because in those riots, I had seen white women taking part. And even when I got on the train, and a mother and her tween daughter looked at me and whispered, I thought I’ve seen children taking part too.
I’m just trying to get home, I thought. I’m just trying to get home. I’m trying to do the same thing as you, I wanted to say, but we’re having two very different journeys.
I didn’t want this to affect me but it has. Some things are simply too hard-wired to overcome, particularly when it comes to survival. It will take a long time to scrub certain videos out of my head, the hateful language of the English Defence League on their call-to-action posts. For now, the borders of what represents home and safety are being redrawn, and will remain so for the time being.
But what I am left with, and what I carry in my chest every single minute of every single day, is how proud I am of who I am, the colour of my skin, the people I represent and how important it is to hold my head up high.
In the old days, we had almost no visibility, no sense of our collective strength and beauty, so when someone called us names or told us our food smelled, we believed it and internalised that sense of self-hatred. Now, there is no self hatred. There is love and pride, and pity for those who choose such a hateful path.
Some things may have stayed the same, but some things have changed, and there is a kernel of hope in that, however small.
If you have enjoyed reading As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell, perhaps consider a paid subscription as it helps fund this newsletter. You’d have my eternal gratitude too!
I felt this deep in my bones sis, thank you. That primitive fear, locked into so many of us as kids is such a difficult beast to tame. I sometimes feel such profound sadness for the children we were before and after
Thank you for sharing, you always find a way to put things across so eloquently