Did you ever wish you were white?
How racism shapes what we see in the mirror
I love my skin, though I’ve not always been comfortable in it. That took a long time. After my first experience of racism in primary school, I knew my pigmentation could make me a target. Being called a ‘dirty paki’ once at a swimming pool affected me more profoundly than I realised; I developed the habit of scrubbing myself furiously in the shower after that and I always used to stay out of the sun.
For a long time I was confused, especially in my teens and early twenties. When I started going on holidays I’d see hoardes of white people doing nothing but lying on sunbeds, or on the beach. Back in the UK, all around me they would be talking about sunbeds. They all desperately wanted to be brown, but at the same time a lot of them hated brown people. I recall being on an aeroplane next to a young woman with skin that looked like bright orange leather, it was hideous, but people were saying she looked ‘lovely and brown.’
Burning in the sun made no sense to me. I always thought pale white skin was beautiful. It was brown skin that bothered me, because it had bothered so many strangers around me. Having brown skin sometimes felt like having a target on my back. Growing up in the 80’s, Hollywood might have had something to do with my inferiority complex. There were no Asian stars. All of the…
