When I was 7 years old, a boy in my class called me a p*ki. Everyone laughed. He was a scrawny little shit that I knew, even then, would have snapped easily, like a particularly dry piece of kindling under the weight of my foot, but I realised that reacting too strongly would perhaps not be appropriate, or politic. To be clear, I am half Indian, but as I've written before, to the untrained, or rather white centric eye, I am generally taken for half black and half white. I have an afro, so most folk don't see the Asian... But P*ki... Even at the tender age of 7, I knew he was not only being ignorant by using racist language but also just plain ignorant... I said to him 'actually, my mum's Indian, not from Pakistan' he looked shocked, and everyone stopped laughing... So I continued... 'Pakistan and India are different countries, it doesn't make sense to call me a P*ki...' everyone (except him) started laughing again, this time at him... He then tried to pull it back by saying 'urgh, you smell of curry', to which I replied, 'I'd rather smell of curry than be stupid'... We then had a physical fight, which he started but I won... He was indeed like a twig, he never fucked with me again...

At the age of 7 I learnt a valuable lesson about race and racism; it is often simply a power trip and unfortunately, as POC, we have to spend a fuck of a lot of time (not to mention energy) fending off shitty remarks and edges, vibes... As you get older, those comments and vibes get subtler, more nuanced but you also get better at recognising them. Unfortunately, it doesn't get any less wearing. Whether it's having to explain to someone you thought was your friend, why you didn't allow their niece to touch your hair and them telling you that her desire to do that had nothing to do with racism, she doesn't even know any black people, she's just curious... Or getting told by random white people that your 'tan' is lovely or just the general standard drip drip of othering, knowing that people clock the colour of your skin way before owt else, which they do... even all of you folk out there who like to say those magical bullshit words 'i see no colour', it is just ALL so tiring.

My ex once said to me that his mother didn't like coming to the UK, because there were too many brown people here, London specifically. He then went on to explain to me that she was not racist (heaven forbid), that things were just different in Belgium... No fucking shit they are, because here in the UK, we pride ourselves on being subtly bigoted, never so openly or crassly racist or sexist. Yes, we do reframing here too, but not like that. Saying you don't like it when there are too many brown people around is BLATANTLY racist. But you know what, at least you know where you stand with that kinda shit. Just like that little boy who called me a P*ki, you can react to it, draw a line and walk off. When people deal in the sort of subtexts that underpins Britishness, it becomes a weird, confusing minefield. Like when you send out your 'dear white allies' letter to folk and half of those people don't respond but some respond by opening up a whole new line of conversation, ignoring what you've said. Or when people ask you to qualify a racist experience you've had, give evidence, proof, validate it further than your expression. Or when people try to explain to you that focusing upon race just maintains racism, that I should just ignore it (Oh, shit, I didn't realise it was MY fault, best tell all those battered wives to ignore their bruises or all those cancer patients to ignore the imminent potential of death, silly victims,if only we knew)...

I listened to a podcast about a year ago, from a dual heritage guy, half African American, half Swedish (I think) talking about his ideas on race... He spoke about how in the run up to his first child being born (his partner is white) that he was working out in his head how he would bring this child up to have pride in their blackness, as his dad taught him, but also how to deal with racism... when the child was born, and was white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired, he was thrown...and decided that the concept of race was meaningless...that it's one genetic marker over another and says nothing about who we are inside. He was advocating transcending race as a way to cure racism and went further to say that anti racists, so I take it by that he also refers to the Black lives matter movement, were in part helping to maintain racism by giving it airspace... Hmmmm... interesting theory...one which presupposes that POC had any hand in creating race, let alone racism and therefore are somehow able to invalidate it's existence. White folk literally created race as a way to justify their financial venture of slavery. I have to say, my instinct is that this man (whose name evades me now, Twatty Mc Twat Face perhaps) is an imbecile at best, a traitor at worst. Because what he is doing is denying the real and valid struggles of POC across the world, saying that, if only they could emancipate themselves from mental slavery, all the rest would fall into place. Is he saying that black folk who struggle in anyway shape or form with racism or othering are just not working hard enough to ignore it, transcend it? Rather than put the responsibility in the laps of those who create, maintain and or benefit from it; ie white people.... Hmmm...The white presenter of the programme agreed with him, said he'd always believed that... obviously, as it's easier to put the responsibility for dealing with racism with poc than, well, himself. Cos like, you know, if you just ignore the fact that you are black, going to have to work AT LEAST twice as hard to get half as far and still probably get kicked in the teeth, spat at, denigrated and abused, if you just, pretend that structural and systemic racism doesn't exist, then magically, it doesn't, you are free... I bet him and Kanye are like, bosom buddies, besties, cos the truth of the matter is that if you come from money or have amassed a degree of wealth (like Kanye & Twatty Mc Twat Face) then racism will not touch you as much, because it is very much tied into power and capitalism.

I wonder sometimes what that little boy at my school went on to become, how my words affected him... I totally humiliated him, not only because I wasn't intimidated by him, nor simply because I beat the shit out of him (he threw the first punch btw) but because I stole his power... I made everyone laugh at him. No, not advocating becoming a bully to overcome bullies, but there was potential for growth and change in that moment, for him. I hope he took it and developed the capacity for compassion and reasoning. If he was using language like that at 7 though, it is highly likely that he learned it at home, so maybe that lesson would have been hard for him to learn. Maybe he went on to join a far right group or perhaps he spent a lifetime fetishising women of colour and abusing them, thinking he was loving them, who knows. All I know, is that in that moment, I became conscious. When was your conscious moment...or maybe, when will it be...? And fyi, being conscious, in regards to race, racism, goes beyond simply saying 'I'm not racist, I don't agree with racism'. It's the difference between the ability to understand an idea, a concept and repeat a phrase and being able to internalise, analyse, evaluate and critique it. You only do that with an idea when it actually means something to you. Anyone can say Black Lives Matter and parrot fashion like come out with stock phrases, but real allies, people who genuinely see equality as important, rather than simply just the 'correct thing to believe in', will want to have something to say about it.