By Sadia Ahmed

As an ethnic minority, being born and raised in England presents some challenges. I don’t fully understand the British culture (although Doctor Who on Christmas day, yes please), not for a lack of trying but it’s hard when your parents can’t explain things to you as they don’t understand either because they grew up in Bangladesh. And then on the other hand, having never stayed longer than 3 weeks in Bangladesh and that’s with a gap of 5 to 6 years between each visit, I don’t fully understand that culture either (although I love visiting!).

I didn’t have any issues in primary school. I luckily went to a very diverse primary school that taking two days off every school year for Eid, talking to my friends about reading the Quran at mosque every week or having curry every night wasn’t anything I was hesitant to talk about, even to my non-Muslim white friends. The problems started to appear when I started secondary school, it was still diverse but significantly less so – occasionally something would be said, and I’d become very aware that I was the only non-white student in the class (or one of the few).

One such time was in year 10 (maybe year 11?) I mentioned I loved my mum’s cooking and how I believed ‘she was the best cook ever’, a friend asked ‘what does she cook’, I simply replied, ‘curry’ and another kid’s haughty response was ‘well she’s obviously not good at cooking then if she can only cook curry’. I felt my face heat up and although (other than a few separate incidents) it had never been a problem for me to be the only brown girl, sitting at a table full of 5 other white students all staring at me (even with two being quite close friends of mine), I remembered feeling so ‘different’. My friend did stick up for me but it had already made an impact.

To never have to experience that horrible feeling of being different especially in the only place I called home, I’ve realised with new friends or co-workers unfortunately until I’m fully comfortable with them I’ll only ever talk about my culture if they ask about it first. I guess that’s just fear from having to deal with even more microaggressions. I say deal, do I ever deal with it? Each word, phrase or statement said to me or near me makes me go through the checklist in my head – do I mention it? What if nobody agrees it’s racist? What if I make studying here or working here uncomfortable? It’s probably better to just ignore it. Yes let’s ignore it, the person hasn’t said anything else hurtful … so I’ll move on, this doesn’t mean I forget what they said …

Regardless the problems growing up and I know there’ll be so many more to come (e.g. being in a room and everyone else laughing at something a co-worker or manager said and you’re the only one not laughing as the joke totally flew over your head), I’m so unbelievably grateful for my upbringing. Being raised as an ethnic minority has made me understand and relate to people with other cultures so much more and I’m always so eager to learn and see how similar or different my ‘normal’ is to theirs. And as cheesy as it is to say, all those experiences have made me who I am and as I get older I’m getting more confident so maybe one day, I won’t do the checklist and I’ll just say ‘that was racist’.