A moment that changed me: learning people disliked me for my skin colour

Poppy Noor
Poppy Noor
Discovering at the age of seven that people were outraged at my very
existence, I would respond with nonchalance. But ignoring racism made me
hate myself
Poppy Noor, aged around eight, with her brothers
Poppy Noor, aged around eight, with her brothers: My brothers would scrap
on hot concrete with boys who had used the dirty word. Photograph: Poppy
Noor
Contact author
@PoppyNoor
Friday 6 January 2017 09.05 GMT Last modified on Friday 6 January 2017
09.07 GMT
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 doesnt make me
half white, although thats what I told everyone.

It had started the summer that I was seven, and had gone back to my
mums 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:

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Whats it like?

What?

You know, being brown?

Erm, well I dont really know because I guess Ive always been brown.

OK Well, if I had the choice, I know I wouldnt 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 didnt like me because of my skin colour.
And I decided that I wouldnt let it faze me. I denied it.

Poppy Noor, aged around 10, with her younger sister at an aunts wedding
in Portsmouth
Poppy Noor, aged around 10, with her younger sister at an aunts wedding
in Portsmouth. Photograph: Poppy Noor
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 childrens 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 doesnt exist anymore, and its true that I
havent 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 countrys being taken over by us, mate?

Poppy Noor as a baby

Poppy Noor as a baby. Photograph: Poppy Noor
Those things made us feel powerful, as though racism wasnt real because it
wasnt 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 couldnt 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 didnt
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 didnt 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 cant change the colour of your nipples, or vagina? The
rare times I did object, they would retort that they didnt like blonde girls
either. It was just a taste.

The thing is, to them it was an isolated incident just their opinion. But
when youre on the other side, its an addition to a lifetimes 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 didnt make people like me more: it just made me hate myself.
Racism was real, and I wasnt going to deny it anymore.