English While It Suits You

People like me are a different type of human being.

People like me live on so many intersections of society, that we don’t really belong anywhere.

People like me are treated like foreigners in the home countries of our parents, and people like me are still treated like foreigners in our own home countries.

People like me — people of colour whose parents immigrated to foreign lands, in my case, England, UK — will never really fit in. And I’m okay with that — I wasn’t really born to fit in, to be honest.

But what I am tired of is the constant reminders that you are not okay with me, or with people like me.

You don’t want anyone but the white man in England, despite the fact that the English went out, colonised and ruined half of the world.

You don’t want us here unless we are somehow justifying our space here; earning our space here.

You don’t want us unless we’re winning the Olympics, or baking cakes for the Queen, or winning football tournaments.

You don’t want us even though we’re on the frontlines saving your lives in hospitals and saving your asses in courtrooms.

You don’t want us even though your kids are best friends with our kids; you don’t want us even though your favourite Friday night takeaway is a curry.

And the worst thing is, you are carrying all of this just under the surface. You pretend it’s not there, but it’s always bubbling away ready to explode at the slightest trigger.

We miss a penalty — you erupt.

There’s a terror attack carried out by someone with the same skin colour as us — so you erupt.

Sometimes, we’re just simply minding our own business in the supermarket — and you erupt.

I live my life in such a way where I try to never see anyone as the other. After all, humanity, underneath all of the noise, is one.

I’m just tired that you don’t even try to do the same. I’m just tired that after all of this time, nothing really has changed.

I’m just tired that, for some, we are only English when it suits you. Despite being born and brought up in England, we are still only English when it suits you.

“The true human identity is this. There is only one country, the earth; one race, the human race; one language, that of the heart, and one religion: the religion of Love.” ~ Sheikh Aly N’Daw.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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